Methodology & source manifest
Everything on the Small Business Administration monitor derives from public records — the SBA FY2027 Congressional Budget Justification (corroborated by CRS IN12694 and R43846), OMB Historical Table 5.2, the USAspending API, and reachable SBA OIG / GAO oversight documents. This page is the audit trail: method, sources, validation, and every flag.
Method
Subsidy cost vs. loan volume; supplementals out of the base
The cardinal separation. SBA is a credit agency: its loan programs move far more money in guaranteed lending than the agency ever appropriates. The 7(a) program carries a zero subsidy rate for FY2027 — it runs on fees, requiring no credit-subsidy appropriation — yet it is authorized up to tens of billions in lending. That lending is loan volume, roughly a hundred times the program's administrative appropriation, and it is never summed into the budget-authority spine. Likewise the one-time PPP/EIDL crisis supplementalsof FY2020–21 — hundreds of billions — are flagged out of the base, never absorbed into the agency's modest steady-state discretionary budget.
What validates, and the honest audit note
The seven discretionary accounts are asserted to sum, to the dollar, to the published all-in discretionary total, and the all-in-less-disaster figure to the published headline “new discretionary budget authority” — anything that fails to reconcile is flagged here, not shipped. And the honest part: SBA does not hold a clean audit. It carries a disclaimer of opinion — five consecutive years of a material weakness tied to its pandemic-relief and PPP loan-forgiveness controls. This monitor states that plainly rather than smoothing it over (the audit page carries the detail). It is exactly why traceable, source-resolved budget data matters: when money moves faster than it can be reconciled to its source, it cannot be reliably counted.
Source documents & validation ledger
The history layer is shown in nominal dollars only — OMB Historical Table 5.2 publishes no constant-dollar basis, and no deflator is synthesized. It is agency-wide budget authority, which includes the one-time FY2020–21 PPP/EIDL supplementals and the negative credit-reestimate years; neither is conflated with the agency's modest annual discretionary base.