BREAKING NEWS -- WSJ Says SBA to Cut 40% of Employees, 2700 Jobs Wall Street Journal’s Meredith McGraw and Scott Peterson exclusively report SBA is planning to cut more than 40% of its workforce this morning.“The extensive workforce reduction and restructuring will take the SBA, an agency with more than 6,500 employees, back to pre-pandemic staffing levels by eliminating around 2,700 positions. The cuts will affect nonessential roles at the agency, and include voluntary resignations and the expiration of appointments made during the Covid-19 pandemic.”SBA administrator Kelly Loeffler also posted a video on X, titled "Change is coming to the SBA." Following is the transcription:"I'm Kelly Loeffler, Administrator of the US Small Business Administration. In my first message from the SBA, you saw what I encountered when I first arrived in Washington. Rows of empty desks sitting in multimillion dollar office buildings, thousands of work from home staff collecting an average salary in excess of a hundred and $34,000. That's more than double the national average wage. But the waste, inefficiency, and mismanagement go much deeper.Since the pandemic, the SBA has doubled its workforce, expanding in size, scope, and spending with miserable results. Instead of reducing the workforce after the pandemic, the last administration deployed the full force of this agency to advance a new partisan agenda from Green New Deal lending programs to DEI contracting. Predictably, the SBA services suffered. For four full years, the agency failed to pass an audit. Our largest loan program, which should operate at zero cost to taxpayers, saw negative cash flow for the first time in over a decade.Meanwhile, they refused to investigate or prosecute more than 200,000,000,000 in pandemic era fraud that is still to this day owed to American taxpayers. That's why change is coming to the SBA. The SBA is getting back to work. It needs to get back to our founding mission of empowering America's job creators. This agency is done wasting millions of tax dollars to fund a progressive pandemic era bureaucracy.We will not allow fiscal mismanagement to threaten our loan programs or criminals to get away with fraud. But we will evaluate every program and expenditure, and we will right size the agency to transform the SBA into a high efficiency engine for America's Entrepreneurs and taxpayers. As administrator, I'm committed to restoring the SBA's mission of promoting America's small businesses with accountability and results. Because when we restore our mission, we will also restore the historic prosperity that lifted up millions of small businesses during President Trump's first term. In short, we will make Main Street great again."
Ughhh. There is always waste in any program and maybe some of these jobs can be cut without causing issues but so much of the other stuff she said is bs.