The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is planning to cut more than 40 percent of its workforce as part of a broader Trump administration effort to slash federal staffing, the agency announced Friday.
The SBA said its loan guarantee and disaster assistance programs, as well as its field and veteran operations, will not be affected. The staffing reductions, which will cut roughly 2,700 jobs from the agency’s workforce of 6,500, will be a combination of voluntary resignations, the expiration of COVID-era and other term appointments, and some job cuts.
The statement also noted that the average SBA employee’s salary is about $132,000 per year, more than double the national average wage.
“The reduction in workforce will save taxpayers more than $435 million annually” by the next fiscal year, it said.
Aside from the reduction in staffing, the agency said that it will work to promote “business formation and growth by shifting resources to expand capital formation functions and personnel, removing the emphasis from partisan programs of the past” as well as promoting fraud prevention, expanding disaster relief efforts, removing pandemic-era positions that are redundant, promoting veteran-run business, and more.
In the statement, SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler said that “in the last four years, the agency has veered off track—doubling in size and turning into a sprawling leviathan plagued by mission creep, financial mismanagement, and waste. Instead of serving small businesses, the SBA served a partisan political agenda–expanding in size, scope, and spending.”
“By eliminating non-mission-critical positions and consolidating functions, we will revert to the staffing levels of the last Trump Administration,” she said, adding it will move to focus on what she described as driving economic growth via supporting small businesses.
“We will not allow fiscal mismanagement to threaten our loan programs or criminals to get away with fraud. But we will evaluate every program and expenditure and we will right-size the agency to transform the SBA into a high-efficiency engine for America’s entrepreneurs and taxpayers,” said said.
In remarks delivered at the White House on Friday, Trump said the SBA will be responsible for federal student loan programs after he signed an order to dismantle the Department of Education on Thursday.
“I’ve decided that the SBA, the Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler, will handle will all of the student loan portfolio,” Trump told reporters inside the Oval Office, adding that the Department of Health and Human Services will now handle special needs and nutrition programs that were once handled by the Education Department.
“I think that will work out very well. Those two elements will be taken out of the Department of Education.”
