Small Business Administration (SBA) Administrator Kelly Loeffler discussed the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown on fraud and what it is doing to address the affordability crisis, in a sit-down interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Loeffler told the DCNF that she believes her “first duty” as SBA administrator is to “ensure that we are good stewards of the American taxpayer dollars.” (RELATED: Two Trump Cabinet Officials Join Forces To ‘Make Manufacturing Great Again’)
“I mean, here we are amid tax season, and Americans are being asked to send their tax bills,” Loeffler told the DCNF. “And so what Americans want to know is that when they submit a payment to the IRS [Internal Revenue Service], is that money is going to be used, appropriately within the federal government.”
“Well, that has not happened for too long,” she continued. “And thanks to President [Donald] Trump’s leadership, he’s commissioned the creation of the fraud task force, of which I’m a member [alongside] 10 cabinet members, along with the leadership of Vice President [JD] Vance. We convened our task force, and that’s a great forum for us to be able to talk about the fraud that we have found.”
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‘STATE BY STATE’
She also claimed that the Trump administration is planning on “going state by state” to identify and combat fraud.
“We have found $200 billion in the aggregate from just COVID-era fraud,” Loeffler stated. “And you think about the scale of that on a state by state basis, starting with California. So far, we’ve said that we found 111,000 residents of California defrauded COVID-era, pandemic relief. So what that means is they will no longer be eligible for SBA services.”
“But also, we are going to make sure that we are part of a team that holds those fraudsters accountable,” the administrator added. “And that’s what the task force is all about. We will be going state by state. And I’m grateful to President Trump’s leadership in this regard, because under the Biden administration, they tried to sweep it under the rug and even forgive the fraudulent actors.”
Loeffler added that “it’s a new day, and fraud is front and center — cracking down and then ensuring that it doesn’t happen again.”
Trump announced on March 16 that he was creating a new task force aiming to use “all available resources and authorities to fight fraud, close loopholes, enforce eligibility rules, and protect benefits for eligible Americans.” The task force has already identified almost $6.3 billion in government contracts given to potentially fraudulent businesses, the Daily Caller first reported on Wednesday.
The SBA announced in February it had suspended 111,620 borrowers in California over suspected fraud related to pandemic-era lending programs. The agency also confirmed in January that it was suspending 6,900 Minnesota borrowers over alleged “fraudulent activity” relating to pandemic-era loans.
AFFORDABILITY ‘FRONT AND CENTER’
Loeffler also told the DCNF that tackling affordability concerns is a “front and center” issue within the Trump administration.
“Well, affordability is front and center because that is President Trump’s key economic action,” Loeffler said. “It undergirds everything that he does, whether it’s working family tax cuts, deregulation, energy dominance or fair trade. And what you saw under the Biden administration was inflation that was rampant, upwards of 21% cumulative inflation imposed on hardworking families. Under President Trump, we just saw the last inflation report, 2.4%.”
“So [we’re] getting that spending that consumers have to do at the grocery store under control and price levels are coming down,” she stated. “What the SBA is doing is ensuring that we [are] reshoring our manufacturing so that we can … kind of control our destiny and [ensure] that we’re creating great paying jobs and we’re making things here, but we’re also providing guarantees on our government loans, a government guarantee on our commercial loans to ensure that small businesses have access to capital, which is the lifeblood of their business.”
“And that small businesses will have access to it because they have the government guarantee on that small business loan. And so hopefully our farmers [and] our producers will be able to produce more once they have more capital,” Loeffler added.
However, nationwide affordability concerns have been steadily rising ahead of November’s midterms.
Some American small business owners previously told the DCNF in March they have been facing cost increases and elevated uncertainty due to tariffs. When asked about the impacts of Trump’s tariffs on U.S. small businesses, Loeffler told the DCNF that the president’s “fair trade policy has been critical to reshoring our industries.”
“So, let’s think back to where we were under the Biden administration,” she said. “They were happy to oversee the continued decline of our industrial base. And what does that mean? It means that over the last 40 years, we lost 50,000 factories, over 5 million jobs. We lost the ability to make basic goods like fasteners and screws and things that hold our country together, literally and physically.”
MAIN STREET POST-BIDEN
Loeffler went on to say that many Main Street businesses had to struggle with massive regulatory burdens during the Biden administration.
“One of the things that really crushed small businesses was the $5 trillion additional regulatory burden that the Biden administration put on small businesses, largely due to their green new scam tax burden that they put on small businesses, our farmers, our producers, our manufacturers,” Loeffler told the DCNF. “And so what we’ve been doing is working hand in hand with agencies like the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], the USDA [Department of Agriculture] and others to deregulate, to take that burden off.”
“And so their focus is really more on things that can help their businesses grow and help them produce more of what we need as a country,” she added. “So, I’m not hearing a lot of that [concerns about energy prices], obviously. It’s a critically important, effort that this country undertake from a national security perspective. But economic security is really top of mind for our small businesses.”
A Gallup poll released in late March found that 51% of Americans said they were greatly concerned about the current state of the U.S. economy.
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