EXCLUSIVE — Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler is downplaying the possibility of her return to the Senate.
In a sit-down interview with the Washington Examiner, Loeffler, who was appointed one of Georgia’s senators in 2020 after the retirement of Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson, said she was unlikely to run again after losing her 2021 special election to Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA).
Warnock is up for reelection in 2028 and has been floated as a possible presidential candidate.
“I could not be more humbled to serve in President [Donald] Trump‘s Cabinet, to serve our small businesses, and to strengthen an agency that is going to create the next generation of our innovators,” she said. “I’m solely focused on delivering on this administration’s incredible economic agenda for Main Street, so I don’t expect to return to the legislative branch.”
Loeffler, the former CEO of financial technology company Bakkt, a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange, a financial services corporation led by her New York Stock Exchange chairman husband Jeffrey Sprecher, is promising to continue “righting the ship at the SBA” during the remaining two-and-a-half years of the administration.
“It’s why we’re advocating for things like [Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification] deregulation, diesel exhaust fluid deregulation, anything that is slowing down the most innovative, hardest working people that are building this country,” she said.
Loeffler, the former co-owner of the Atlanta Dream professional women’s basketball team, described the SBA’s “core business” as providing government guarantees on small business loans, with the administration guaranteeing 85,000 loans last year.
“Small businesses create two out of every three new jobs in this country,” she said. “That’s why we wanted to double our loan sizes. We’ve been advocating for that. We announced a new rule that allows you to stack a 504 and a 7(a), two separate loan types, for $10 million. The last time it was increased was 2010, so 16 years ago, so that’s why it’s set at $5 million now.”
Longer term, Loeffler pledged to focus on the innovative sectors that require immediate investment and “how we can serve that.”
“That’s why we’ve partnered with the Department of War‘s Office of Strategic Capital, the same with NASA,” she said. “We just signed an MOU with NASA to speed capital to our innovators through programs like our SBIC program, the Small Business Investment Company program, where venture capital firms can get SBA guaranteed leverage to provide to the defense industrial base critical technologies, space exploration, and beyond.”
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For Loeffler, that marks a return to the mission of SBA’s predecessor agency, the Small Defense Plants Administration.
“Building out the industrial base, that has been President Trump’s vision since long before he was president,” she said. “He was talking about our supply chains since the 1980s, and strengthening our foreign policy through our economic strength. So, that’s what we’re doing.”