Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship held its own oversight hearing to examine fraud, waste, abuse and duplication at the Small Business Administration. Perhaps the largest difference between this hearing and that held before the House Small Business Committee a week earlier was that this hearing focused early on fraud. Because [...]

When the House got finished with her, SBA Administrator Karen Mills faced a somewhat friendlier panel on the Senate side of Capitol Hill. The Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship finally held its second budget hearing of the 111th Congress last week. Very naturally, Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA) was full of praise for President [...]

SBA Administrator Karen Mills had a busy day last Wednesday. Before she appeared before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship to defend her agency’s fiscal 2011 budget request, she joined SBA Inspector General Peggy Gustafson at an oversight hearing before the House Committee on Small Business. Recent House rules require quarterly oversight hearings [...]

As much of a nightmare as this recession has been for the entire global economy, and as scary as it was to watch the entire capital market system upon which capitalism rests teeter on the brink, there has been one ray of sunshine to emerge from the shambles. Some of the more obscure microbusiness service [...]

President Obama may have proposed a three-year freeze on discretionary spending but among those items he considers worthy of increased investment is the U.S. Small Business Administration. The President’s budget proposal for fiscal 2011 includes an increase of $170 million for the SBA, which would bring the agency’s budget up to $994 million. Those on [...]

Even though there wasn’t much in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) that was specifically useful for microbusinesses, that is not meant to imply that the Obama Administration ignored small businesses completely. In fact, the ARRA included a fairly significant to-do list for the U.S. Small Business Administration, most of which was focused on [...]

While everybody was busy hyperventilating over the down-to-the-wire legislative uber-drama of health care reform late last year, Congress was also relatively quietly getting its regular housekeeping chores done. Among said chores — which include such critical matters as the naming of post office buildings — was the disposition of those federal spending bills. There had [...]

Suddenly, lawmakers were taking a second look at Microloan.

Not that they haven’t always been willing to look at it. It is thanks to their consistent support that President George W. Bush was unable to get rid of it, even though he tried for three years or so.

But, now that President Obama has demonstrated that he is willing to seriously fund the program, and now that lawmakers have seen they way Microloan Intermediaries were able to pick up some of the slack when the major SBA 7(a) lenders had a collective hangover, some people are starting to talk about increasing the loan cap and expanding the program.

And I will confess to you that it bothers me.

Oversight hearings, which fell out of fashion during most of the Bush Administration, came roaring back when Democrats took over Congress in 2006. In fact, there were those who thought said Democrats would use said oversight hearings to exact their revenge against Republicans for nameless partisan crimes and misdemeanors. That didn’t happen, of course. Mr. [...]

Last week, the Finance and Tax Subcommittee of the House Committee on Small Business completed mark-up of SBA capital access reauthorization legislation. That is a good start on the self-imposed October 31st deadline established by the most recent continuing resolution. In fact, the subcommittee passed a whopping eight bills up to the full committee following [...]