Office of Rural Affairs Enhancement Act

This section would let the Act be called the Office of Rural Affairs Enhancement Act.

This section would amend Section 26 of the Small Business Act (15 U.S.C. 653), which sets up the Office of Rural Affairs at the Small Business Administration. It would replace the rule for choosing the Office's leader: the Office would be run by an Assistant Administrator who must be an employee in the competitive service (the standard merit-based federal civil service hiring track). That person would be required to have both education or professional experience with, or knowledge of, rural affairs and issues relating to small business concerns, and experience providing development assistance to rural small business concerns. This section would also change several of the Assistant Administrator's existing duties. Wherever those duties currently refer to small business concerns located in rural areas, they would instead use the term rural small business concerns, the same group, now given a defined term in the law, with no other change to what is required. The duty to provide information would be changed to a duty to promote the policies and programs of the Administration and of other federal departments and agencies for assisting rural small business concerns. In paragraph (5), the reference to the United States Tourism and Travel Administration would be replaced with the National Travel and Tourism Office of the Department of Commerce, and the reference to small businesses in rural areas would be replaced with rural small business concerns. This section would also add a new duty for the Assistant Administrator to host webinars and outreach events for rural small business concerns, and it would adjust list punctuation in the surrounding duties so the list reads correctly with this new duty added, with no other substantive change to those duties. This section would add a new outreach requirement: the Assistant Administrator must host webinars and outreach events in various regions of the United States for rural small business concerns, and must invite representatives from the Administration's district offices, resource partners, federal and State agencies, and other interested persons to take part. This section would also add an annual reporting requirement. Not later than 180 days after this subsection becomes law, and every year after that, the Administrator must submit a report to the House Committee on Small Business and the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and must also post the report publicly on a website of the Administration, covering the Office's activities during the one-year period before the report. Each report must include the Office's operational details (the Assistant Administrator's name, the Office's budget, and the number of full-time employees employed by or detailed to the Office); a summary of the Office's activities carried out under its duties; the number of webinars and outreach events the Administration held to promote the policies and programs described above and to provide the information described in the Office's other duties; an analysis of how the Administration's lending programs serve the needs of rural small business concerns; and information gathered from any webinars and outreach events held during the period covered by the report. Finally, this section would define terms used in Section 26 of the Small Business Act. Assistant Administrator would mean the Assistant Administrator of the Office of Rural Affairs appointed under the new appointment rule. Resource partners would mean small business development centers, women's business centers, chapters of the Service Corps of Retired Executives, and Veteran Business Outreach Centers. Rural small business concern would mean a small business concern located in a rural area, as already defined elsewhere in the Small Business Act.