Project 2025 is the 900+-page monstrosity (in all senses of the word) created by the Heritage Foundation and their ilk to remake the federal government in their own fascist image. They figure nobody will read it, but we will! There are several areas that will severely impact women, so we will concentrate on those in this column. Here is a somewhat scannable pdf version, where we can unpack some of their rhetoric without increasing traffic at the Project 2025 site. Last month we covered their plans for “Health and Human Services”. This time, let’s look at the economy.
The authors include in this section plans for the Department of Commerce, Department of the Treasury, Export-Import bank, Federal Reserve, Small Business Administration, and Trade. I want to keep this in digestible pieces (difficult to do!), so this week let’s look at their plans for the SBA.
There are about 13 million women-owned businesses in the US currently, about 42% of all US businesses. Although this is not enough, it is a vast improvement from the 400,000 women-owned businesses in the US in 1972, and the SBA’s financial assistance programs specifically for women helped build that. The Biden-Harris administration has increased SBA loans to women by 70%. So what happens to the SBA will impact women and would be likely to cause backsliding.
There is a lot of verbiage in the Project 2025 discussion of what should happen to the SBA, including some proposals for expansion in limited SBA programs, but what it boils down to is cut, cut, cut. Although they are cagey about that, they review some of the history of the agency’s budgets. From p. 747:
President Ronald Reagan cut the SBA’s budget by more than 30 percent, and his annual budgets regularly proposed to eliminate the agency altogether. Under President George W. Bush, SBA Administrator Hector Barreto said that SBA’s goal was “to do more with less,” but this changed because of Hurricane Katrina and a surge in disaster funding.
They go on to include President Obama’s initiative, to look less partisan:
In 2016, President Barack Obama considered streamlining and combining SBA programs and other business-related agencies and programs under one entity at the U.S. Department of Commerce, but opposition within the small-business lobby in Washington scuttled the effort.
That does appear to be true. A couple articles from then, www.govexec.com/…, thehill.com/… but they do not detail his reasons. I suspect that this was in his proposed budget because the House was majority GOP from 2011-2019 and the Senate switched from 53-45 Dem majority in 2013-2015 to 54-44 GOP majority in 2015-2017, so this was part of proposed compromises to get a budget passed.
It is also true that there is waste and fraud in the SBA. What government agency is going to be perfect? But the SBA already has its own oversight from the Office of the Inspector General. They continue to make progress to reach goals set by the OIG. And whilst they admit to perhaps about $200 billion in fraud related to Covid relief, that is out of a budget of $1.2 trillion for such relief during an unexpected emergency. So questionable payments in this extreme instance amounted to possibly 17% of what was given out. The SBA is not ignoring this, they even provide contact information for citizens to report fraud, waste and abuse, including anonymously if you choose. This compares with about 20% big-business fraud in government contracts. And the government is not oblivious to this; many cases are being investigated by the DOJ. So cutting the budget will not eliminate fraud and waste. It could eliminate the ability to provide adequate expertise and oversight to detect fraud and waste.
Specific areas of concern to Project 2025 are instructive. What is one concern? “Mission creep”. What do they cite as part of mission creep? Page 749 (bolding mine):
There is unease that the agency has moved from being open to any eligible small business searching for support to being hyperfocused on “disproportionately impacted,” politically favored, or geographically situated small businesses and entrepreneurs. Today, initiatives aimed at “inclusivity” are in fact creating exclusivity and stringent selectivity in deciding what types of small businesses and entities can use SBA programs.
They continue with their concerns regarding the poor disadvantaged Christian:
For example, even though the SBA under President Donald Trump proposed a rule to remove all of the unconstitutional religious exclusions from its regulations to conform with Supreme Court decisions that have made their unconstitutionality clear, the SBA has not acted on the proposed rule and still uses religious exclusions in determining eligibility for business loans.
They want to end the use of SBA form 1971, which is here and requests details regarding, basically, if any of the loan would advance the establishment of religion. According to Project 2025, however, page 754:
Supreme Court precedent and Office of Legal Counsel memoranda refute the notion that large government-backed loan programs raise any Establishment Clause concerns.
Look for yourself and let us know what you think. Should taxpayers be paying for the distribution of religious materials, religious instruction and services?
And what example do they give regarding Covid-era PPP loan “fraud”? Planned Parenthood! Because of course they do. Page 753:
For example, under the CARES Act, PPP loan applicants generally were eligible only if, together with all their affiliates, they had no more than 500 employees. Numerous Planned Parenthood affiliates self-certified eligibility for PPP loans during the initial wave of loans that were governed by the CARES Act’s size requirement. Many Senators and Representatives asserted that these Planned Parenthood organizations were ineligible because—considered together with their affiliates—they exceeded the maximum eligible size. The Trump Administration SBA notified several Planned Parenthood PPP recipients of its preliminary determination of their ineligibility and of SBA’s authority to take various actions against applicants that falsely certified their eligibility. To date, despite continued oversight attempts by Members of Congress, the SBA has taken no action on the Planned Parenthood loans other than to forgive them, and in 2021, it approved new PPP loans to Planned Parenthood affiliates.
This was certainly not a Planned Parenthood problem. Obviously the disagreement will be over what is a relevant “affiliate”. But many big businesses applied for and received loans for which they probably should have been ineligible. See www.propublica.org/… and many other reports on the issue. What a “coincidence” that Planned Parenthood is their area of concern!
And so if anything is left of the SBA with MAGA minions in charge, the money will probably go to good white Christian Republican men in good standing. For example, as we near the end of this section, after claiming that the SBA needs more experienced experts, on p. 758 comes an echo of the loyalty pledges we know are already in the works:
The SBA Administrator and leadership team must share the President’s mission and vision and execute the Administration’s policies effectively.
And in conclusion on p. 759:
A conservative Administration should rein in these idealistic and impractical efforts, get current programs under control and properly staffed with people who can manage and perform competently, and outsource efforts where private-sector expertise is appropriate and more efficient.
Helping the disproportionately impacted and women who need healthcare, whilst avoiding enabling the spread of religion. How idealistic and impractical!
Still here, so far
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