Thanksgiving with the SBA: A Recipe for Financial Disaster

Posted: November 28, 2025 – 11:30 AM

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow sufferers. While you're sitting around the table trying to explain to your relatives why your business went under, let me share a recipe that the SBA has been perfecting for years. It's called "How to Completely Destroy Small Business Confidence in Government." And trust me, they've got this one down to a science.

The Ingredients

Start with one pandemic that shuts down the entire economy. Add a relief program designed by people who've never run a business in their lives. Fold in billions of dollars with zero fraud controls. Let it simmer while legitimate businesses wait months for approval. Then, for the finishing touch, aggressively collect from the survivors while the actual criminals walk free with Lamborghinis and diamond chains.

    Fun fact: The average EIDL application took 127 days to process in 2021. The average fraudulent application? 3 days. The SBA literally prioritized criminals over honest business owners.

    

I'm not making this up. Fraudsters who submitted applications with fake Social Security numbers, nonexistent businesses, and obviously stolen identities got funded within days. Meanwhile, a bakery in Cleveland with 30 years of tax records waited four months and got denied because their PDF was the wrong resolution. That's not a hypothetical. That's a real story I heard from someone in our community.

The Thanks We Got

Remember when the SBA promised that EIDL would be a lifeline? Remember when they said small businesses were the backbone of America and they'd do whatever it took to help us survive? Yeah, I remember too. Those promises aged like milk in the sun.

Now they're garnishing Social Security payments from retirees who took out loans to save their businesses. They're seizing tax refunds from people who are already struggling. They're ruining credit scores and blocking future opportunities for entrepreneurs who did everything right but still couldn't survive a global pandemic.

So this Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for one thing: the community of people who've banded together to expose this disaster. You're not alone in this. We're all at the same table, eating the same bowl of bureaucratic sh*t, and at least we can laugh about it together.

Pass the rage, please. It goes great with turkey.