SBA proposes $500 million firms as 'small business,' same year it dunns actually small ones for pandemic loans.

…(cont) While that number was climbing, the agency's lending side was running the opposite column. In September, this paper reported that Washington ordered businesses closed during the pandemic, then lent many of those businesses money to survive the closures it had ordered — and six years later is demanding the money back, from owners who in some cases never recovered. These were not ordinary loans made in ordinary times. They were issued because the government shut the business down and told the owner to hold on.

Reconcile the filing against itself. The same agency, in the same year, is weighing whether to let a $500 million company call itself "small" to compete for contracts set aside for businesses that are actually small — while collecting on loans issued to businesses that actually were small, for closures the government itself ordered. One column of the ledger stretches the definition of "small" until a half-billion-dollar balance sheet fits inside it. The other column holds the line on "forgivable" tight enough that a shop that never reopened still owes the Treasury.

Nobody at the agency has had to explain why those two numbers move in opposite directions in the same filing year, hon, because nobody has asked them to reconcile it. That is the job of this column. The $500 million threshold is still a proposal, not a finished rule — the agency "wants to" make the change; whether it survives the comment period and takes effect is not yet decided. What is not a proposal is the collection notice already sitting in the mail of a small business that closed because Washington told it to, borrowed because Washington offered to, and six years later is being asked to pay the government back for following instructions.