Ames, Iowa
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When Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler touted that her company ensures roughly 2,000 small enterprise loans each week, Laura Pager, a small enterprise contractor who says she has misplaced out on thousands and thousands of {dollars} in work this 12 months in the wake of the Department of Government Efficiency’s slashing of the federal authorities, wrote it down in disbelief.
Pager, the president of an Illinois-based contracting agency that contracts with companies throughout the federal authorities, was sitting in the third row at an occasion hosted by GOP Sen. Joni Ernst with Loeffler and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin designed to assist small companies and entrepreneurs study extra about federal and state contracting alternatives in the Trump administration.
The optimism she was listening to on stage was not reflecting her actuality.
“I don’t know who the 2,000 small businesses are that were approved every week,” stated Pager, the president of Gale Construction Company. “I could tell you it’s not mine.”
“Since January 20, 2025, SBA has approved 46,430 504 and 7(a) loans for over $24 billion – as well as 25,032 disaster loans for $3.8 billion. This equates to nearly 2,500 loans per week,” SBA spokesperson Maggie Clemmons advised NCS.
The small companies occasion hosted this week by Ernst at Iowa State University comes as her social gathering has been tasked with utilizing Congress’ month away from Washington to promote President Donald Trump’s massive agenda. That effort, on the heels of Trump’s unprecedented overhaul of the federal work force and the GOP’s historic cuts to the social security web amid different provisions in his “big, beautiful bill,” has already met some resistance from members of the general public.
In her almost three a long time of expertise, Pager says she has not seen something like the present setting for small companies.
She’s misplaced out, she stated, on roughly $6 million in work this 12 months after DOGE pulled contracts as a part of its federal cost-cutting efforts — one to safe a federal constructing in Pittsburgh that homes the Internal Revenue Service and Army Corps of Engineers and the opposite to repair the HVAC at an airport management tower in Maine. She stated {that a} go-to contact for her on the SBA, a region-based enterprise alternative specialist who helps small companies navigate the federal authorities, retired with nobody showing to switch her
“We don’t have the number of resources and the people to go to anymore,” stated Pager, who stated she voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and works largely with Republicans. “Agencies we work with generally have a much more limited staff now. And I feel like they’re flustered.”
The occasion on Tuesday laid naked the competing realities for small companies attempting to work with the Trump administration. While Trump and his Cabinet are searching for to advertise enterprise in the United States and tout the president’s signature legislative achievement to this point, their push to downsize the federal authorities has left some enterprise homeowners and entrepreneurs with questions as they attempt to navigate a altering setting.
It’s requiring a threading of the needle for company heads and GOP lawmakers —Republicans, who’ve broadly referred to as for slashing federal spending, now discover themselves having to make the case for why small companies ought to discover their companies a worthy funding accomplice. In Iowa this week, they appeared to border the talk.
On prime of Loeffler and Zeldin’s visits, Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins visited the Iowa State Fair over the weekend to announce new rural improvement investments and Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright is anticipated to go to the state later this week.
“We are reshaping the federal government to be more responsive to the private sector,” Loeffler argued.
Ernst, who’s going through reelection in 2026 and wouldn’t remark to NCS Tuesday whether or not she plans to defend her seat, says her third annual “Made in America Expo” was designed to assist companies in her state develop direct relationships with the decisionmakers in the federal authorities. But as chair of the DOGE caucus in the Senate, she argued that chopping the dimensions of the federal authorities will assist small companies develop.
“We know that federal government is not the answer when it comes to issues at the local level. Those that are most responsive are at the local level,” she stated. “So, downsizing the federal government, pushing some of that outward, especially into the heartland where we actually have people that do want to work, provide efficient services for the federal government, that’s the opportunity that we should be providing.”
Ernst’s occasion sought to carry key politicians and representatives from throughout the federal authorities to Iowa as an opportunity to degree the taking part in subject and create face-to-face interactions. Many small enterprise administrators for his or her respective companies had been in attendance.
Charlie Smith, director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, complimented Ernst and the company heads for his or her emphasis on creating small enterprise partnerships, suggesting the difficulty of making that connection is just not essentially new.
“That’s always been the struggle, is to make the opportunities known to small businesses,” he stated. “And I think this administration’s got a number of initiatives that are looking to do exactly that.”
To hear Loeffler, Zeldin and Ernst describe it, the Biden administration was utterly unsuitable in the way it tackled small enterprise improvement.
“We inherited a very big mess,” Zeldin claimed.
Part of their pitch in how they’re making alternatives higher for small companies was highlighting the intensive cuts they’ve made to their companies to get rid of what they noticed as waste and emphasizing their want to get authorities out of the way in which to encourage extra manufacturing and investments in the US.
The directors and Ernst pointed to wins from Trump’s tax and spending legislation, which can create a number of tax breaks that benefit small businesses, equivalent to permitting companies to completely and instantly deduct the price of constructing new manufacturing services. The trio additionally credited Trump with protecting overall inflation tame in July and pointed to investments just like the more than $90 billion from non-public corporations throughout tech, vitality and finance to show Pennsylvania into a man-made intelligence hub.
Ernst, who chairs the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, promoted her new, bipartisan laws that will enhance the utmost mortgage restrict for small companies in an purpose to spice up domestic manufacturing. She hopes the invoice will get a closing vote when the Senate returns in September.
Meanwhile on the occasion, Iowa GOP Rep. Randy Feenstra stood in entrance of a crowd of small enterprise leaders and entrepreneurs to make his case for why they need to help Trump’s sweeping tax and spending cuts legislation.
“Maybe some of you don’t always think it’s beautiful. I do,” Feenstra quipped, earlier than ticking via an inventory of tax breaks which can be geared towards serving to small companies particularly.
Feenstra, who has launched an exploratory committee for governor, is just not going through a troublesome reelection battle ought to he stay in the House. But two of his Republican Iowan colleagues, GOP Rep. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, are operating in some of probably the most aggressive House races in the nation for subsequent 12 months’s midterms and are having to be much more delicate in their pitch.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise was in Iowa this week making public appearances with Nunn and Miller-Meeks and fundraising on their behalf. Speaking with NCS on the Iowa State Fair, Scalise and Nunn laid out their perspective to voters and offered a window into how Republicans try to promote Trump’s landmark laws – as a substitute of getting pulled into discussing the so-called Jeffrey Epstein recordsdata.
Throughout his remarks on Tuesday, Zeldin argued that the EPA can each defend the setting and develop the financial system after the administration’s transfer to repeal the so-called endangerment finding that planet-warming pollution from fossil fuels endangers human well being. But companies in Iowa, a Republican stronghold that uses more clean energy than many blue states, should additionally cope with Republicans’ rollback of fresh vitality tax credit.
Iowa Republicans now face the problem of getting to defend the elimination of the renewable vitality tax credit in Trump’s trademark laws that they sought to guard.
Scalise and Nunn argued the elimination of these credit doesn’t imply they don’t help renewable vitality, but argued the elimination was designed to create a good taking part in subject and ween the US off of international vitality. Nunn additionally pointed to the tax credit score for biofuels that he labored to get in the ultimate invoice.
“We’ve got a great opportunity here in Iowa with wind. We are the number one producer and consumer of wind. We’ve made this work,” Nunn advised NCS. “It’s most important that we’re not dependent on foreign energy anymore. And this bill delivers that.”
Scalise addressed the laws’s deep cuts to Medicaid and defended the work necessities Republicans put in place, which Democrats have seized on in their messaging in opposition to the legislation.
“By putting in place responsible work requirements, now it’s going to help the truly needy be able to get better care in programs like Medicaid. And then the folks that are going to go get work, which is a good thing by the way, are going to be able to get work and get a job and get health care in the private sector, which is going to be even better than Medicaid,” he stated.
Small enterprise leaders and entrepreneurs increase issues
But for some in attendance at Ernst’s occasion on Tuesday, what the officers had been promoting wasn’t the complete image.
Victor Santana, who owns a Chicago-based firm that helps tons of of small companies nationwide safe federal contracts, stated he spent a lot of the occasion introducing small enterprise homeowners to representatives from federal companies.
“They are lost,” Santana stated of the enterprise leaders he met on the occasion. “They can’t figure out which way is up, which way is down.”
Santana, who stated he has been in the enterprise for twenty-four years and prides himself on his authorities contacts, stated he’s gotten few solutions about replacements or a path ahead after the slashing of the federal workforce.
“It’s like, ‘Wait a minute, so and so’s not there? Well, who is taking over? Who is in charge?’” Santana stated of his conversations with company contacts. “That’s scary because a lot of these small businesses need to know. It’s very hard to work with government and get those answers.”
For some in the viewers, Zeldin’s message of rolling again environmental rules is trigger for concern.
Jordi Quevedo-Valls, who co-founded a startup market designed to facilitate the shopping for and promoting of small companies, stated the EPA’s rollback of environmental protections is regarding and has an actual affect on how companies transfer ahead.
“I mean that I completely disagree with. I mean, the science is there,” Quevedo-Valls, who stated he “reluctantly” voted for Harris in 2024, advised NCS.
From Fairfield, Iowa, Quevedo-Valls stated he’s pleased with some of the Trump administration rollbacks but referred to as the choice to part out clear vitality tax credit “terrible, terrible, terrible.”
The emphasis from Ernst and the Trump administration officers on creating new companies left Tanner Heikens wanting clarification. Heikens stated he voted for Trump, but has issues he likes and doesn’t like in regards to the administration.
“I’m glad that they’re pro-business, but I think that they’re pushing creation of business and not worrying as much about existing businesses, especially in the labor force that we’re in,” stated Heikens, who works at an Iowa-based meals manufacturing firm that feeds between 50,000-70,000 individuals per week in the restaurant and well being care industries.
“In the manufacturing world it is tough already, and if you’re putting a bunch of money into new businesses, that’s just thinning the herd already.”