Half a century of SBA budget authority — and two spikes that dwarf all of it.
The Small Business Administration's budget authority, FY1976– FY2031, from OMB's Historical Tables. SBA is normally a few-billion-dollar agency — but in FY2020 and FY2021 Congress routed the COVID-19 PPP and EIDL response through it, briefly making it one of the largest spending lines in the government, before downward credit reestimates pulled FY2022 below zero. The spikes are one-time; the base is small.
FY2027 budget authority
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nominal · OMB estimate
Pandemic peak
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Base peak (ex-pandemic)
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Trough
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SBA budget authority — the arc since 1976
nominal (current $) · OMB Historical Table 5.2 · symlog scaleReading the arc
Almost everything on this chart fits in a band a few billion dollars wide. The two amber bars do not: FY2020 and FY2021 carry the Paycheck Protection Program and the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program — emergency lending Congress routed through SBA at a scale more than a hundred times the agency's normal base. They are SUPPLEMENTAL and one-time, and this monitor treats them that way: flagged, never folded into the base. The rose bars (FY2022 most dramatically) are real negatives — when the government revises the expected cost of past loan guarantees downward, the credit-subsidy reestimate can net the agency's budget authority below zero. The series is nominal: OMB's Table 5.2 publishes no constant-dollar basis, and we do not synthesize one.