H.R. 5892: Keep Main Street Open Act

H.R. 5892, the Keep Main Street Open Act, would order the SBA to run a loan program for eligible small businesses any time the government is in a shutdown. It's a short bill — one operative section — and it does one thing: turn a funding lapse into a guaranteed line of credit for the businesses caught in it.

The loan is built around your losses. The amount you can borrow equals the losses you estimate the shutdown caused — there's no fixed cap written into the bill. The interest rate can't go above 1%, and you'd have up to one year from the day the shutdown ends to pay it back.

The timing is generous on both ends. The bill counts a shutdown as starting the first day appropriations lapse, and it keeps running for 30 days after Congress restores funding. So the help doesn't stop the moment the government reopens — it covers the messy recovery month too.

Who qualifies leans on rules that already exist. An eligible applicant is anyone who fits the SBA's existing definition of an eligible recipient — the same standard the agency used for pandemic-era PPP loans — and the loan itself runs through the SBA's established 7(a) lending channel. The bill builds on the SBA's current machinery rather than inventing a new one.

What the bill leaves open matters too. It names no total dollar amount, sets no program-wide cap, and spells out no penalties, fees, or forgiveness. The core promise is simple: if Washington shuts down, the SBA has to lend affected businesses what they lost, cheaply, with a year to recover.