Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] The Small Business Administration (SBA) recently suspended nearly 7,000 Minnesota borrowers for suspected fraud in pandemic-era small business loans totaling nearly $400 million.

“We worked through the holidays, from Thanksgiving up to New Year’s on about 20,000 different files, found about 8,000 instances of fraudulent loans, and moved quickly to make sure that those borrowers … could never access the services of the SBA again,” said SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler.

They’ll now be taking the same model to investigate other states for COVID-era abuse of the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans.

In this episode, I sat down with Loeffler to understand her work targeting fraud nationwide, bolstering domestic manufacturing, cutting regulations, and ending politically motivated debanking.

Loeffler grew up on a family farm in Illinois, was the first in her family to graduate from college, and later became a successful businesswoman in finance and FinTech before becoming a U.S. senator and now head of the SBA.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of  NTD.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Kelly Loeffler, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

It’s an honor to be with you. Thank you.

So let’s start with the thing that seems to be in the news all the time. There were over 6,000, almost 7,000 borrowers that have been suspended in Minnesota. As you were saying, it’s about $400 million worth of fraudulent loans. That seems like a hard move or a strong move to a lot of people. What happened exactly?

Well, when I came in from day one about a year ago, I said it was a new day at the SBA [Small Business Administration]. And why is that? Because, first of all, during the Biden administration, they had never cracked down on fraud. And what is fraud? It’s a crime. So what we did was look at what was happening in Minnesota, and we said this is a great place to investigate deeply immediately. And we did that.

We worked through the holidays from Thanksgiving up to New Year’s Day on about 20,000 different files, found about 8,000 instances of fraudulent loans, and moved quickly to make sure that those borrowers-there were about 7,000 of them, some of them had two loans-could never access the services of the SBA again. That includes everything from small business lending, on which we provide a government guarantee, to a disaster loan. Now, because of this blueprint we have, we’re going to be able to go state by state and see where people have defrauded the federal government, which means taxpayers, to ensure that they are investigated, that we’re turning those files over to federal law enforcement, and that they can’t receive federal support.

You know, some of the criticism around this issue, around this move, I guess, right? We learned about Minnesota and, you know, very quickly, I mean, within days, you know, almost 7,000 borrowers are suspended. It almost felt like a blanket thing. You’re kind of suggesting that there’s, you know, sort of deliberate looking at every one of these files. Can you just kind of unpack that a little bit for me?

Absolutely. So this was very much driven during COVID. We saw that $1.2 trillion in federal funds went out through the SBA [Small Business Administration]. That was in the form of the Paycheck Protection Program [PPP] and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan [EIDL] program.

$1.2 trillion. That’s a lot. Now, it was a lot of money, but what the federal government had asked the country to do was to shut down their businesses, to stay home, and small businesses, which make up 99 percent of all businesses in this country that employ nearly half our workforce. There’s 36 million of them now, a record number under President Trump. But these businesses were told to cease operations. It was devastating and would have been even more devastating had that federal assistance not come out.

Most small businesses were legitimate and used it for good, kept their employees on the payroll, and made a huge difference locally. Those businesses are back on their feet. But there’s a certain group of actors that saw opportunity in disaster and defrauded the government. Under the Biden administration, they quickly started forgiving fraudulent actors’ loans that had already been flagged as fraud. There was a set of thousands of loans that had been marked as fraud. They were never further investigated. Those cases were closed, and those loans were being forgiven.

We’re going back now and just saying these files are now closed. They’ve been marked as fraud. We’re sending them to federal investigators because no more sweeping this under the rug. We’re going to hold people accountable.

So it’s retroactive. I mean, is that included in these 7,000 or is that beyond that 7,000?

Absolutely. It’s included. Yes. And that’s the lion’s share of it. That’s where we see a lot of the fraudulent actors. What we know now is they come back to the trough. When there’s a disaster, they see an opportunity to profit from it. We see that in all the other federal programs, which is what’s so great about the Minnesota response: it’s all of government. You’ve got the USDA [U. S. Dept. of Agriculture], HUD [Dept. of Housing and Urban Development], the Dept. of Treasury, the Dept. of Education, DHS [Dept. of Homeland Security], HHS [Dept. of Health and Human Services], everyone looking and saying, okay, this is the roadmap for looking at how people are defrauding the federal government systemically and at scale.

Okay. So aside from giving loans when there’s an emergency, which with $1.2 trillion, I’m still trying to fathom that number, what exactly does the SBA do? I think some people don’t even know it exists for that matter.

Yes, you’re right. Well, particularly in the last four years, the SBA was dormant. Under President Biden, 90 percent of the employees worked from home for four years. Sadly, our Main Street job creators saw a complete absence of the SBA. The SBA was formed over 70 years ago when veterans returned from World War II. The country recognized that these veterans were so capable that they could build businesses and that they were job creators. We needed that industrial base to continue to grow.

The SBA was created to provide private sector banks, commercial banks, of which we have about 5,000 signed up within our agency, with a substantial government guarantee to make loans to small businesses where they may take a risk that they wouldn’t normally take because there’s about a 75 to 85 percent government guarantee, not unlike some of the housing guarantees of the past. or other types of federal loan programs, HUD, first-time homebuyers. That gives small business lenders the confidence to lend.

Our program performs really well normally. We have a low default rate, maybe less than 2 percent on a good day. What that provides is massive capital. Capital is the lifeblood of small businesses. Once they have that loan, they can hire. Small businesses create two out of every three new jobs. They can sign a lease or purchase property, plant, and equipment. Most manufacturers in America are small businesses. The economic engine, the flywheel, starts from there, and the small business is right there at the start.

Well, and actually, you know, tell me a little bit about your background too, because I think, you know, actually even before I really looked into you, I kind of had this sense the whole time that you came from big money. I don’t know why that is. Maybe this is the liberal media. It’s possible, right? But I found out something different. But just tell me about your background.

Thank you for asking, Jan. First of all, I’m so humbled to be in this role because of my background. I could have never imagined that growing up on a small family farm, fourth generation, we now have our fifth generation, which I’m so proud of, farming the land back in Illinois. I grew up on a family farm. My father was a veteran. Because of what he learned in the Air National Guard, he learned how to haul jet fuel. He thought, wow, I can translate that to starting a small trucking company in our agricultural community. So we had the farm and the trucking company.

I started working in the fields when I was eight. I got my first job busing tables when I was 15 and waited tables for the next six years through high school and college. I was the first in my family to graduate from college, what a blessing, because I went off to build a business career inspired by what I saw my parents running a small business where my dad was in the field driving a truck. My mom was dispatching trucks, hiring, and dealing with the massive red tape that is involved in farming and trucking.

I was so inspired by my parents. I thought, I want to be in business, either have my own business or work in business. I went on to do both and then got involved in politics because of what I saw.

Well, and there’s a little part where it worked out, your business attempts, right?

Yes. Like most business people, you make some steps forward; you have some steps back. I had many over my 30-year career in financial services, many setbacks, but I did have success. But I was part of taking not one company public, but two. I was blessed to be part of a private company that went public. It’s now part of a Fortune 500 company. I also started a company that is now a public company in the crypto space.

When I served in the Senate, I was the only chartered financial analyst to ever serve in Congress. And so I felt like, based on my financial acumen, I wanted to bring that to Washington because I saw it completely absent when I was in the private sector and being regulated and being told what we could and couldn’t do by people who didn’t know our business, didn’t understand free enterprise or fair markets or transparency or reporting or accountability. So that’s what I went to Washington to do because I knew that as a farm kid, I owed it to every other young person who didn’t believe that the federal government understood them, to have someone up there fighting for them.

You know, while I have you here, I have to ask this, OK? I have this theory about a way that we could teach our young people, and it has to do with the idea of prosperity. It took me until probably I was 45, okay, before I actually learned where prosperity came from. And I spent years in university, okay? Clearly, maybe not even business. I don’t know what they teach in business school exactly. But there’s this, I think, the socialist and communist sort of approach to the world, that the sell is that the rich people take it from the poor. That’s the prosperity, right? But prosperity actually comes from somewhere else. If we taught that, I mean, I think a five-year-old could understand the basics.

Well, I’m living proof of it. I’m someone that had no connections. I went to public school, state university, and worked hard. And I think that’s what socialism and communism doesn’t teach, is kind of that self-reliance, that individualism that you should be proud of and discover your talents and your gifts and your interests and pursue them and take calculated risks. That’s all the stuff that socialism and communism discourages. That’s why it’s shocking to see it taking hold in New York City, of all places.

Well, and just that you assume the pie, and this is as a biologist, my background is in biology, just because that’s how it works. The pie is finite, right? You can’t expand the pie. So you have to take it, right? If you’re going to have a piece of it, you need to take it from someone else. But that’s not how it works. There’s innovation. There’s division of labor. I mean, there are different theories about prosperity, right? But I don’t think a lot of people know them.

No, it’s cynical and false to say that the pie is this big, because that means life is a zero-sum game. And the only way I can get ahead is if you fall behind. And that is not the story of America. And the story of America is one that the world wants to replicate. That’s why they’re coming across our borders and trying to live the American dream. In some cases, in other cases, it’s drugs and thugs coming across, but they’re trying to exploit the American dream. But hard work and the American principles of freedom, opportunity, faith, and the ability to believe in something better in yourself, that you can be part of something bigger, is so beautiful.

That’s the story of small business. That’s why I get out of bed every day. And I can’t believe I’m blessed by this job to work for President Trump, to serve our job creators. They may never touch the Small Business Administration, but they should know that they have a fighter up here for them, for policy, for advocacy within this administration, not just in me, but in President Trump.

So I know one of the things that you’re interested in is that over the last, I guess it’s four years, five years, I’m not sure of the exact timeframe, but a number of these small businesses that we’re building, like you were describing, were debanked for no ostensibly good reason. And this is something you’re looking into seriously. Can you give me a, I don’t know, like a progress report or something like this?

Absolutely. So thanks to President Trump’s leadership and sadly his own personal experience and that of his family, we understand that debanking is a real thing in this country. And because of his leadership, we now have the executive order that the SBA was charged with being part of the regulatory group, the OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency], the FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation], and the Fed [Federal Reserve System] to investigate debanking. And so we led the charge in sending out 5,000 letters. That’s our network of banks. You think about the SBA, we’re really like the private sector side of the government. We have the connection to the small businesses, to the banks. So we were honored to lead that charge.

But we know that under Obama, it really started with Operation Chokepoint 1.0, where they started defunding, debanking, and disfavoring people. And they even went as far under the Biden administration to put it into the regulatory apparatus so that you’d be penalized as a regulated entity if you provided banking services to everything from Christians to pro-life to second amendment supporters, you name it. It could be considered a reputational risk for which the OCC or the Fed might downgrade you and require more capital, putting real costs into the banking system and discouraging customers from being banked. Completely unfair.

President Trump, it happened to him and his family. It happened to me during my political campaign. And so I know firsthand this is going on. So we sent out letters, got a very good response, and continue to go through those responses in collaboration with the regulatory agencies to ensure it doesn’t happen again and that those problems are fixed and people are held accountable.

Can a bank just… I mean, this is an interesting question, right? I have my business. It’s private. It’s a private bank, and I just don’t like this person. So I’m not going to have them as a client. Am I not allowed to do that?

Well, look, banking is about risk management. I come out of the risk management business. I understand it inherently as well as the child of a farmer working on a farm. That’s what farmers do. They manage risks constantly. And in the banking world, you want to make sure your loan is going to get repaid and that you’re doing it consistent with regulatory guidelines important, and we’re not funding nefarious operations that are undermining the country or the banking sector writ large. But look, there are discriminatory actions that are being taken. And we’re in a country, the country, the exceptional country in the world that upholds freedom and liberty and opportunity. And to use the banking system to be a choke point for disfavored political people is abjectly wrong. And the president is reversing that.

And I mean, I know that the Civil Rights Division at DOJ is looking at these questions. I guess you’re working together, Harmeet Dhillon.

Harmeet’s doing fantastic work, and I appreciate her leadership so much. So the DOJ will probably be part of the broader response once we have all the responses. Right now, we’re going through the reporting, the regulatory evaluation, and then we’ll determine what I find incredibly important personally.

And that is, I mean, I call it in my head, remanufacturing. You call it reindustrialization, I think. But basically, it’s my own belief that there is no future. You can’t have a successful country unless you have your own manufacturing base. It’s like the beating heart of the country. And of course, the small business is a central piece of this. What’s happening with that?

There’s so much happening. And it’s so exciting. And it’s interesting. In 2010, Andy Grove foreshadowed President Trump’s important tariff and national security policy in a piece he wrote about how manufacturing underpins national security. And if we lose basic commodity manufacturing, we’re going to lose the ability to protect ourselves, to be secure, and to feed ourselves. And so, you know, fast forward to today, 15 years later, the president has brought in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, trillions in commitments to build in this country, which is incredibly exciting to have a president who believes in American industry and in the American worker.

We know that thousands of factories, maybe 50,000, 70,000 factories were scrapped from America, and millions of jobs were lost. I grew up in the industrial heartland. I saw communities hollowed out, what it did to families, and what it did to opportunity. So we know that the industrial base is important to make things, but it also builds communities, families, and opportunity. And we have to get back to that skilled workforce of making things and building things because we have an administration like no other point in history that believes that that can be done again.

Case in point is that, you know, our rare earth and critical minerals ability to process them is virtually not, it’s not entirely non-existent, but it’s close. And, you know, that said, actually, I’ll mention this. There’s all sorts of innovation happening in this space. There’s a company now in Houston, a factory that just got commissioned last month, that’s basically pulling this stuff from electronic waste. And it’s actually a thousand times more concentrated. I’m always astonished at the ingenuity. So maybe there is a solution. Maybe there is a solution to that problem. Maybe there’ll be hundreds of these factories that are popping up.

And that’s why small business is so important in the manufacturing pipeline because most manufacturers are small businesses. So they meet the statutory requirement of fewer than 500 employees and the net worth standard. So small businesses are really refueling our onshoring renaissance, along with President Trump’s policies. I mean, the working families tax cut was so important because you have 100 percent expensing of made in America factories, you have incentives for workers to work more, and no tax on overtime.

I’ve walked factory floors in more than half the states of this country. I’ve had many factory workers tell me that they’re going to work more hours because their overtime is not going to be taxed away now. And when I talk to small businesses, particularly manufacturing, their number one concern is a skilled workforce. So as far as they’re concerned, the sky’s the limit. We can build it. We’ve got a backlog of work to do, but we need the workers to do it.

And small businesses are the innovation engine around training the workers because they have the apprentice programs and the connections to community colleges and trade schools. So this is all coming up from small businesses, though it’s the big factories that we think about in history. I’ve talked to many large Fortune 500 companies, and they say they can’t build in America without small businesses because it’s the contractors, the builders, and the small businesses that get it done for them.

Do you have a particular focus on manufacturing-related small businesses, or are these programs across the board?

Well, certainly we do have a focus on manufacturing. So, in my first month, I announced our Made in America manufacturing tour and all the programs that go with it, an onshoring database that helps manufacturers determine if the products they need are already onshore. It’s a directory of a million suppliers in this country. We do build things in the country.

The liberal media doesn’t want us to think it’s possible. They don’t think that the value that factories provide is meaningful, but that’s completely opposite when you go out in the heartland and see it getting done, or on Long Island in New York, or even in California, where some people bravely continue to operate their businesses. So, it is getting done, and I’m just raising the visibility and then advancing things in Congress.

So, we’ve thrown our support behind the Made in America Manufacturing Act, which raises our loan limits to $10 million from $5 million, because the AI, the advanced manufacturing robotics, and robotic welding that I’ve seen in factories are actively reshoring industries in real time. So, they need that capital.

You know, another area that I’m kind of aware of where there are, I guess, issues, is specifically from a national security perspective is basically medical ingredients or medicines, even antibiotics. From what I’m aware of, there’s only one American company left that makes penicillin or amoxicillin specifically. But the problems companies like this have are that they’re being basically undercut and, in many cases, deliberately, you know, I don’t know if it’s officially dumping, but it’s effectively dumping, and they’re kind of unable to compete with these, you know, generics coming from mainly China, some of it through India and so forth. And we know that China has this strategy, right, of basically taking over entire markets for particular products.

Well, and when I was in the Senate, I introduced the Beat China Act, which was to bring manufacturing back onshore because we saw, as you mentioned, the APIs weren’t being made here. We’re dependent on them for every piece of manufacturing. But we also know that we’ve overregulated our manufacturing sector. So, even manufacturing in pharma can be very hard in this country.

And the SBA has been tasked with leading a strike force, a deregulatory strike force. As an agency under statute, we have the ability to work across every federal agency to help deregulate and get out of the way. of those that want to build and grow in this country. So sometimes we’ve driven it overseas ourselves. So we have to look at that. And I’m excited.

And I’m worried about this piece because I think I am aware, of course, I’m aware of this legislation. But, you know, since Trump 45, there’s been a lot of thinking about this. Even during the Biden administration, there’s been thinking about this. But it really hasn’t happened much from what I can tell.

Right, yes. People forget Biden put additional tariffs on China even after President Trump did. So the Biden administration doubled down on that. But no, it’s an issue that the administration now is actively working on. We’re working with them on it on a number of fronts. And I’m thrilled that great entrepreneurs are. This is what it’s about. It’s about not having the government solve every problem. We’re here to empower the private sector and make sure that we’re getting out of the way, but yet making sure that they have the capital and the regulatory environment to build.

So another piece that I know that you’re working on is, you know, contracts having been awarded based on immutable characteristics. That maybe would be the simplest way to put it and not necessarily based on skills. I want to understand how you’re looking at this because probably in some cases, the correct contracts were awarded to the correct people, even though there was a DEI initiative associated with it. In other cases, perhaps that wasn’t the case. How are you kind of, I know you’re trying to dig into this and basically root it out, I guess.

Yes. So federal contracting and the fraud that happens within Washington, D.C., around these programs are probably the worst-kept secret in Washington. And from day one, I said, we’re going to root out DEI, and we’re going to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. And unfortunately, both of those are represented in federal contracting, specifically in the 8A program. And so that’s what we’ve been focused on. And there have been some very high-profile DOJ actions last year that highlighted the wrongs of the 8(a) program.

So essentially, a big company or a non-qualified company will act as a pass-through and then have a small business use that person to say, I’m a small business. But then they charge more to give to that person to pay them off, and then they charge more for their services. So it costs the taxpayer; the federal government is a trillion-dollar spender. So this is every year.

So it’s a huge cost to the American people when these programs are defrauded. So we have a whole path. We’re cracking down on that. We have an investigation, a 15-year look-back audit going on. And then we have right now, we’ve requested three years’ worth of information because, in that program’s 45-year history, it’s never been audited. And so I called for an audit, not just of this agency on day one, but of that program.

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