Chairwoman Maria Cantwell
Maria Cantwell currently serves as a United States Senator for the State of Washington. As a leader in public service and in the private sector, Maria has always embraced the values she first learned growing up in a working-class family. With the help of Pell Grants, Maria was the first member of her family to graduate college. Later, she worked in the private sector in Washington's technology industry.
Maria has served in the U.S. Senate since 2001, and currently sits on: the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; the Committee on Finance; the Committee on Indian Affairs; the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.
On February 12, 2014, Maria was named Chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. It is her second Committee chairmanship, having previously served as Chairwoman of the Committee on Indian Affairs.
On the Small Business Committee, Maria has been a Senate leader in expanding opportunities for small businesses to grow and create jobs. She played a pivotal role in Senate passage of the landmark Small Business Jobs Act of 2010, which expanded small businesses’ access to capital at a time when credit markets were frozen.
“Nobody pushed us harder to understand the connection between small banks and small business more than Maria Cantwell.” -- Treasury Department Counselor Gene Sperling, on Maria’s efforts to pass the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010.”
In the Small Business Jobs Act, Maria fought successfully to create a new Small Business Lending Fund to get capital flowing to Main Streets across America. The Small Business Lending Fund has helped increase private-sector lending to credit-worthy small businesses through community banks. Participating community banks have increased small business lending by over $12 billion through March 31, 2014.
With Maria’s support, the bill also helped energize the Small Business Administration’s popular 504 and 7(a) loan guarantee programs. Last year, the 7(a) loan program injected more than $17 billion into communities across the country. As Chairwoman, Maria is continuing to work to increase access to capital for small businesses by raising the program level for 7(a) loans, restarting the 504 refinancing program, modernizing the SBA Microloan program for small business loans up to $50,000, and reauthorizing the Intermediary Lending Program, which provides loans in a critical lending gap between $50,000 and $200,000.
Maria has also made it a priority to increase opportunities for America’s small businesses to export their products around the world. Maria has been a leader on efforts to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank and State Trade and Export Promotion (STEP) grant program. As the world’s middle class expands from almost two billion today to near five billion by 2030, exports represent a huge opportunity for American small businesses to sell products abroad and create jobs here at home. But fewer than 5 percent of small businesses currently export, meaning that the large majority of small businesses cannot access the 95 percent of the world’s consumers that live outside our country. To encourage small business export growth, in 2010 Maria worked with her colleagues to create the new STEP grant program in the Small Business Jobs Act. The STEP grant program has already resulted in more than $900 million in export sales by small businesses, an average return on federal investment of 15 to 1.
