Small Business Administration

Elias Hernandez, the associate administrator for the Office of Veterans Business Development at SBA, emails the director of the National Finance Center (NFC) asking for immediate admin access to the mainframe for “all SBA Personnel Office Identifiers (POIs)”. NFC is a shared service from USDA that handles payroll for roughly 150,000 federal employees across 170 agencies including the SBA.

Edward Corisitine and Donald Park are granted access to the SBA’s core financial and loan systems within five hours of the CIO authorizing the request.

After being granted access to the National Finance Center for information about staff at SBA, Edward Coristine writes to an associate administrator and chief human capital officer at SBA to ask for the phone number of the CIO for the National Finance Center at USDA.

Stephen Kucharski, director of the SBA’s Office of Performance Systems Management, emailed 19 colleagues with an urgent request: “Please help me and my OCIO colleagues as we mobilize to provide Edward Coristine and Donald Park Admin access to all SBA systems. This action has been cleared and we are on a very short time frame.” They were to be granted access to HR and procurement systems. He then follows up with the agency CIO.

Within three hours of the request, Edward Coristine and Donald Park are granted “admin authority” to the mainframe and read-only access to the NFC Insight and Reporting Center applications. This gives them the ability to see sensitive information like salary, banking information and even debt for employees at the SBA (and possibly other agencies)

Email to SBA staff announces that Edward Coristine and Donald Park were granted access to all systems including HR, contract, and payment systems.

Donald Park sets up the @DOGE_SBA account on X as a communications channel for DOGE and a place for the general public to snitch on agency activities. He does not involve agency communications staff that would normally handle social media accounts.

The SBA CIO, Marcus Alzona, who had been in the role for about a month, is abruptly removed from his position.

DOGE announces on X.com that it has made some changes to the loan application process at SBA to require a date of birth and to pause applications for certain age ranges. It’s unclear how much actual fraud this might have prevented.

Luke Farritor uses his admin access to lock out all government officials at multiple agencies from using grants.gov to issue new grants. Instead, all grants must now be sent to a new email address which will be reviewed by DOGE staffers before grants can be posted.

In a response to a FOIA request made by American Oversight, SBA provides a list of all people who have been identified as communication on agency head Kelly Loefler’s behalf. It includes a number of people known to be DOGE and others with the title Senior Advisor who might also be doge.gov

Appearing before Congress, the SBA Administrator Kelly Loefler claimed that DOGE had cancelled contracts worth more than $3 billion dollars in savings. DOGE’s own “wall of receipts” only listed $22 million in savings for the agency.

In an email to agency partners, the operators of grants.gov declare that the revised mechanism added in April that routed all Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) through a DOGE email address has been reversed. Instead, agencies are to return to using the tool like that did previously. This doesn’t necessarily mean that DOGE or political appointees will not be reviewing grants, but they have no longer locked other users out of the system.

Senator Ed Markey sends a letter to the Kelly Loefler, Administrator of the SBA, demanding more details by August 8th on DOGE’s access to SBA systems.