Taking the long view, two months isn’t terrible as far as getting an SBA Administrator into place. It took President Bush twice as long to bestow Hector Barreto upon us.

Under the current circumstances, though, these two months have seemed like an eternity.

There is an awful lot of work to be done at the SBA and none of it will get started in earnest until Mills is confirmed. At the same time, none of the rest of us can assess her plans for the agency until she is in place and can provide us with said plans.

There’s also the minor matter of a collapsing economy.

Probably the most urgent concern that policy makers have about small businesses in the current downturn, and the one they are best positioned to address, is access to capital. And the tool best suited to address that issue is the Small Business Administration’s 7(a) guaranteed loan program. Under normal circumstances, those 7(a) loans are counter-cyclical. [...]

Most of the time, when people discuss the SBA’s entrepreneurial development programs, they are singing their praises in no uncertain terms. Which is why it was both surprising and understandable that witnesses at last week’s House Small Business Committee hearing appeared to have been instructed to can the beatitudes and tell us what’s wrong with [...]

Shortly before Christmas, President-elect Obama gave the politicians and pundits an early gift by making his final few pre-inauguration appointments. One of the nominees in that last batch was Karen Gordon Mills for Administrator of the Small Business Administration. Reaction from policy makers was swift and uniformly positive. Everybody was talking about Mills’ excellent qualifications [...]

What happens to small business lending when the banks collectively go into a spasm and traditional financing routes dry up? With the exception of the Microloan program, almost all the lending in the SBA’s stable of capital access programs is done by banks. In an economic situation in which small businesses can’t get loans, not [...]

President-elect Barack Obama told his radio audience during the Democrats’ weekly address this weekend that he and his economic team would act boldly to deal with an economy that was generating more bad news every week. He promised to inject new life into the economy by investing in infrastructure projects and building a new alternative [...]

It will be interesting to see whether Senate Democrats publish another of their “reports” outlining their accomplishments for small businesses during the second session of the 110th Congress. Perhaps there will be one or two provisions in the Disaster Loan program improvements legislation or the energy bill. But when it comes to the Small Business [...]

Yes, fans, there’s yet another spat over loan caps going on, this time over the Community Express pilot version of the 7(a) loan program. On the surface, at least, the matters appears to be fairly straightforward. The Small Business Act has a provision in Section 7(a) that prohibits more than 10% of the number of [...]

Steve Preston took another steps toward cementing his place in history as master of rescue and retrieval for the Bush Administration last week, during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Assuming that he is confirmed — and there is every indication that he will be — he will [...]

The most conspicuous effort at serving so-called “underserved” markets on the part of the SBA to date has been the Microloan program. But while the Administration has not abandoned its efforts to find a way to reduce Microloan program costs, SBA Administrator Steve Preston is also plugging a pilot program called Emerging 200. The idea [...]