Sponsors (7)
The bill strengthens transparency and advocacy for small businesses—giving them clearer information, greater input, and expanded legal standing—at the cost of substantially greater analytic, administrative, and litigation burdens on agencies and taxpayers, which may slow rulemaking and, in some cases, weaken broader public protections.
Small businesses (including nonprofits and specialty groups) get clearer, more accessible, and tailored regulatory information — plain-language guides, NAICS-tagged summaries, an SBA rulebook, advance access to analyses, and expanded outreach — making it easier to find, understand, and prepare for federal rules that affect them.
The SBA Office of Advocacy (and the Chief Counsel) gains stronger formal roles in rulemaking and review — including consultation rights, comment and intervention authority, advance report review, and a clearer path into judicial review — increasing small-business representation and accountability in agency decisions.
Agencies must perform more robust, transparent analyses of small‑entity impacts (including considering alternatives, quantification or explicit justification of non‑quantified impacts, and broader RFA coverage), improving the factual basis for rulemaking and helping stakeholders evaluate costs and benefits.
Agencies will face substantially greater procedural and analytic burdens that are likely to slow rulemaking, increase administrative costs, and delay implementation of new regulations, affecting services and protections delivered to the public.
Expanded standing and intervention rights for the SBA Office of Advocacy and new litigation windows are likely to increase the frequency, length, and cost of lawsuits over agency rules, delaying implementation and raising legal costs for agencies and taxpayers.
New analytic, disclosure, summary, outreach, and IT posting requirements will raise compliance and administrative costs—particularly for smaller agencies—which may be passed to taxpayers or regulated entities and strain limited agency resources.
Based on analysis of 14 sections of legislative text.
Strengthens RFA protections: expands SBA Advocacy authority, requires deeper impact analyses, pre‑publication reviews, periodic rule reviews, and limits first‑time paperwork fines for small businesses.
Official title: To amend chapter 6 of title 5, United States Code (commonly known as the "Regulatory Flexibility Act"), to ensure complete analysis of potential impacts on small entities of rules, and for other purposes.
Introduced January 15, 2025 by Benjamin Cline · Last progress January 15, 2025
Strengthens the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Act by giving the SBA Chief Counsel for Advocacy new authority to set or approve small‑entity size standards for many statutes, expanding what counts as a covered rule and what analyses agencies must prepare, and creating new review, consultation, transparency, and judicial‑review procedures. It requires agencies to consult and share draft impact materials with the Chief Counsel for Advocacy, to prepare more detailed initial and final regulatory flexibility analyses (including quantification when possible), to post plain‑language summaries online, and to adopt periodic review plans to reduce disproportionate impacts on small entities. The bill also adds protections for small businesses against first‑time paperwork fines, requires a GAO study of the Office of Advocacy’s capacity, and gives the Chief Counsel authority to issue binding rules, intervene in certain proceedings, convene review panels, and be joined or intervene in judicial review of agency compliance with RFA requirements.