President-elect Donald J. Trump chose Kelly Loeffler, a top donor to Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign and a former Georgia senator, to head the Small Business Administration.
“Kelly will bring her experience in business and Washington to reduce red tape, and unleash opportunity for our Small Businesses to grow, innovate, and thrive,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. “She will focus on ensuring that SBA is accountable to Taxpayers by cracking down on waste, fraud, and regulatory overreach.”
Ms. Loeffler has little experience in public service. She was appointed to fill a vacated Senate seat in Georgia by Gov. Brian Kemp, serving from early 2020 until she was defeated in a special election by the Rev. Raphael Warnock in January 2021. In the final days of her Senate career, Ms. Loeffler played a prominent role in Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Ms. Loeffler underwent a significant political transformation during the first Trump administration. She had been seen as a moderate, business-oriented Republican when she was appointed to the Senate — a move viewed by many as an effort to make the Georgia Republican Party more widely appealing.
But Ms. Loeffler made a hard-right turn in office, portraying herself as a fervent supporter of and rubber stamp for Mr. Trump as she prepared to defend her seat in the 2020 race. Mr. Warnock ultimately won by two percentage points in a runoff election.
If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Loeffler would lead an agency that is responsible for delivering billions in loans and disaster assistance to small businesses across the country. The S.B.A. played a major role during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it distributed hundreds of billions of dollars to help businesses stay open and continue paying their employees.
The agency was heavily scrutinized for its distribution of the pandemic loans. The Paycheck Protection Program, which was established by the CARES Act that Mr. Trump signed into law, was rife with fraud. The S.B.A.’s inspector general has estimated that more than $200 billion — or at least 17 percent of the pandemic loans the agency distributed — was awarded to “potentially fraudulent actors.”
Ms. Loeffler was previously the chief executive of Bakkt, a cryptocurrency trading platform that the president-elect’s Trump Media & Technology Group is reportedly in talks to purchase.
She comes from a prosperous farming family in central Illinois, and in her early 20s was given large tracts of some of the richest agricultural land in America. As senator, Ms. Loeffler briefly served on an agricultural subcommittee that oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates the derivatives market, but stepped down to dispel questions over potential conflicts of interest.
She is married to Jeffrey C. Sprecher, the chief executive of Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange. She appeared to have received stock and other awards worth more than $9 million from Intercontinental Exchange, when she left her position there to serve in the Senate, according to securities filings, Ms. Loeffler’s financial disclosure form and interviews with compensation and accounting experts.
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