In this episode of The Center for USA Lending’s The Lending Brief, sponsored by Allocore, we’re joined by Anthony Curcio, founder of Summit Consulting and a 20-year veteran of federal credit policy, for a practitioner’s guide to what it takes to stand up a new federal loan program. Drawing on his time at OMB and decades advising agencies across the credit spectrum, Anthony makes the case that we’re living through a golden age of new credit programs, and that the stakes for getting program design right have never been higher.
He walks through the step-by-step playbook: defining your credit product before anything else, knowing how to engage OMB without ignoring them or showing up empty-handed, getting your back-office accounting ready before you cut the ribbon, and understanding why direct loans require extra discipline precisely because they’re so powerful.
He also offers a provocative idea:
The $5 trillion federal lending portfolio may be one of the best early warning systems for economic stress that no one is fully using yet.