Capping Excessive Awarding of Sblc Entrants Act of 2025

Floor Speech

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Ms. CHU. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 2987, the CEASE Act, because it has the potential to harm our Nation's most underserved small businesses.

This bill would cap the number of Small Business Lending Company, or SBLC, licenses that the SBA can issue at its current level of 16 licenses. These licenses enable lenders to make loans of up to $5 million to small businesses that we know often struggle to secure financing from traditional banks.

If Republicans wanted to find a solution to bipartisan concerns about SBA's capacity to oversee an increased number of licenses, Democrats would have been happy to work together on this. Unfortunately, this bill fails to address our serious concerns about how it could devastate opportunities for capital access for the small businesses that need SBA's help the most.

Specifically, this bill is completely silent about how this cap on licenses would impact Community Advantage SBLCs. We know that one of small businesses' greatest challenges is obtaining access to financial capital. For over a decade now, the Community Advantage program has been helping close this funding gap for underserved businesses who face this challenge disproportionately like rural, veteran, and low-income small business owners.

I will never forget visiting one of these businesses in Santa Monica, California. It was a salad-based restaurant owned by two young Hispanic men who had this dream of expanding their restaurant, but they were turned away by every traditional bank due to a lack of assets and credit history. Finally, they were able to get a $250,000 Community Advantage loan, and now they have six of these restaurants.

It was a relatively modest sum, but $250,000 was what it took to make these small business owners successful, and that is why I have long believed in the Community Advantage program. However, it was operating only as a pilot program, and that is why I sponsored a bill to make it permanent. This bipartisan bill has passed out of the House, but the Senate did not take it up.

Great relief, however, came in 2023 when the SBA established by rule the Community Advantage SBLC program to provide long-term assurance for the program and lenders. Since then, there has been great progress: 143 lenders have registered as Community Advantage SBLCs. In 2024 alone, these lenders have already issued 1,100 loans totaling $196 million to the most underserved small businesses with an average loan size of $160,000.

Congress needs to build on these efforts by providing statutory permanency for Community Advantage, but the bill before us today goes in the opposite direction, potentially threatening the future of Community Advantage SBLCs because it makes no mention of how these licenses would be impacted by the statutory cap.

Congress must ensure that our most underserved small businesses have the resources they need to not just survive but to grow. That is why I will reintroduce the Community Advantage Loan Program Act, which will give permanent authorization to this program.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support our Nation's veteran, rural, and low-income entrepreneurs by voting ``no'' on this bill.

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