Big Business Just Got Called 'Small'

Note: Public comments on the proposal are due Sept. 21, 2026. Scroll to the bottom for instructions.

A billion-dollar private equity firm. A casino making $744 million a year. The federal government wants to call these... small businesses. If you own a shop, a restaurant, or a service business here in the Charleston area, this affects you.

The Small Business Administration decides who counts as "small." That label controls who gets federal loan guarantees and who gets first shot at government contracts set aside for small businesses — over $200 billion a year. Right now, the SBA is proposing to blow those size limits way up. More than 114,000 additional companies would suddenly qualify as "small."

We're talking about movie theater chains with up to 2,700 employees. Engineering firms making a quarter-billion dollars. Banks with $5 billion in assets. All potentially "small" under this plan. Meanwhile, your actual small business - the one on Market Street or Rivers Avenue with 8 employees - competes against them for the same programs.

This isn't hypothetical. Researchers looked at past (much smaller) increases in these thresholds. When bigger firms qualified as "small," real small businesses lost revenue, filed fewer patents, cut payroll, and closed at higher rates. The youngest, most promising businesses got hit hardest. This proposal is a much bigger version of that same experiment.

So who wins? The more than 37,000 companies that already hold $71 billion in federal contracts would now also compete in the small business lane. Private equity firms buying up local businesses get more room to grow before losing "small" status. It flips the SBA's whole purpose upside down.

Here's the good news: this is still just a proposal, and it's open for public comment right now, through September 21st. Regulators like these mostly hear from big businesses with lobbyists. They need to hear from us. Go to regulations.gov and tell them what this means for your business.

Learn more in the recent article by Institute for Local Self Reliance.