Small Businesses and the Strength of America’s Defense Supply Chain

0:00 Speaker 1 Well, Sunday morning with us today is a small business administration, Kelly Laufer. And she used to be a U.S. senator again. And, well, Kelly, tell us what’s going on that the American people want to hear on a Sunday morning.

0:21 Speaker 2 Well, what’s really exciting, John, and good morning, everyone. What’s really exciting is manufacturing coming back to this country, but not just for building cars and aerospace. We’re supporting our warfighter with the Smaller War Plants Commission that Secretary Pete Hegseth and I just stood up in August. We’re now formalizing it with creating a funding pipeline to fund those

0:46 small manufacturers of defense technology equipment If you think about small manufacturers’ role in our defense industrial base, they make up 70% of it. So let’s just take a Patriot missile. It takes 400 small businesses to contribute to a Patriot missile.

1:06 The weapons provider to our military, Sig Sauer, requires 1,200 small. Businesses to.

1:13 Speaker 2 In their pipeline to deliver their product. So you think about re-strengthening American industrial and military dominance, it starts locally with small businesses and especially our manufacturers.

1:27 Speaker 1 Understood. And that’s a lot of small businesses. How much money do you guys put out a month or a year?

1:36 Speaker 2 Well, that’s a great question, John. So we are at historic levels for capital access to small businesses under President Trump. He understands that small business is big business. He reminds me of that all the time. And last year, in fiscal 25, we did $ 100 billion in On the lending side, that amounted to about 1,600 small businesses every week that

2:03 got funding from the SBA. And it looks like in fiscal 26, we’re on track for a similar number. So you can see that the Trump tailwinds are in effect. People have stopped. unprecedented confidence in the future. They wouldn’t be starting businesses at record levels like we are today.

2:21 New business formation is at about a half million new businesses every month. And then you have employment. You’ve got a million new jobs created. And that means someone believes that they’re going to be able to pay that work and provide benefits. And most jobs are created by small businesses in America. And so they’re really our innovation and

2:43 our employment pipeline. And that’s why they’re so important to President Trump.

2:49 Speaker 1 Understood. Sunday morning. What else do you want to do? There’s so many people sitting around wanting to know what’s going on in the world. You run the world the best because small businesses are the ones that worry about the most. about where they get their money and how they can stay in business.

3:13 Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah. So, John, I was in New York recently. We were talking about the power of free enterprise. You know, it’s incredibly powerful to be able to have someone who believes in their dream to take risk, to put capital behind it and all their space. the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into small business ownership and maybe one day

3:35 building it into a big business. And that’s why we think it’s so important that we push back against these socialist tendencies that some in New York are trying to push because here’s the bottom line. Small business and socialism can’t coexist. You can’t have strong, free enterprise when the government’s putting heavy regulations, heavy taxes, heavy controls on free enterprise,

4:01 because that’s where opportunity comes from. And that’s what we’re making sure is that we provide that on-ramp into the American dream for more job creators, their employees, and then really building this country for the next 250 years on the framework it was built on, freedom, free enterprise. and just the strength of what our founding fathers started 250

4:27 years ago.

4:28 Speaker 1 They’ll be creating new family businesses where the father gives it to the son and the grandson. Family business is what grew America. And thank you again for everything you do for America. And thank President Trump for everything he does for America and for small businesses. And a hundred billion a year you lend out. Oh, my God, that’s

4:54 a lot of money.

4:54 Speaker 2 And we have to be good stewards of it for taxpayers. And that’s what we do every day because President Trump knows small business is big business.

5:02 Speaker 1 Thank you so much. And we’ll talk again real soon. Thank you.

5:05 Speaker 2 Thank you, John.