Highlights from the President's FY15 Small Business Administration Budget Request

Enacted FY14 funding is used for comparisons unless otherwise noted.

The administration’s FY15 budget request for the Small Business Administration (SBA) is $710 million, a 7.8 percent decrease from FY14 (not including presidential disaster funding). Of this amount, $47.5 million is for business loan subsidy and $197.8 million is for non-credit programs. Through the Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative the administration also proposes public-private investment funding to support the scaling-up of new advanced manufacturing firms into full-scale commercial production.

SBA has defined several key priorities for FY15 that support competiveness and job creation. They include: improving America’s entrepreneurial ecosystem with a focus on high-growth entrepreneurship that includes regional clusters and growth accelerators; and, building capacity and depth in the small business supply chain to strengthen manufacturing and exporting.

In FY14, SBA’s non-credit programs were separated into a new account called Entrepreneurial Development programs. For FY15, SBA’s request for non-credit program funding would increase by 0.8 percent.

FY15 budget request for SBA Entrepreneurial Development Programs

The funding request of $5 million (100 percent increase) to support the growth accelerators initiative will be used to either scale up existing successful growth accelerators or provide funds via a competition to university and private sector accelerators to start a new accelerator program or entrepreneurship ecosystem based on successful models.

Through its Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) program, the SBA is authorized to invest up to $4 billion annually in high-growth businesses. The president’s budget requests $4 billion in FY15 for the SBIC Debenture program (no change).

Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs would receive $584,000 in FY15. This reflects a decrease of 87.2 percent from FY14 that included $2 million for SBIR evaluation. These funds will be used to launch a central commercialization database to track data and perform business intelligence analysis. During FY15, SBA plans to implement and monitor multiple cross-agency initiatives designed to improve program effectiveness, including sharing best practices and continuing to enhance the TechNet database.

Funding for the Business USA Initiative would double under the president’s budget to $6 million. Launched in 2012, BusinessUSA.gov serves as a one-stop resource for businesses to access government support services and coordinates federal business assistance programs. With the increase, SBA plans to incorporate more features and upgrade its content management system. 

SBA’s primary economic development program, the 504 Certified Development Loan program, which provides “brick and mortar” and major equipment financing, would receive $46.5 million in FY15 (1.4 percent increase). This funding would support $7.5 billion in lending authority for the 504 loan program.

The budget also calls for a public-private investment fund as part of the administration’s manufacturing initiative. To address the gap in financing for new manufacturing firms, the budget proposes as part of the Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative, a fund of funds to support transformative manufacturing technologies in the U.S. Once fully deployed, the fund could eventually leverage up to $10 billion in total public-private investment.