WASHINGTON, D.C. – Last week, Congressman Roger Williams (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Small Business, and Rep. Mark Alford (R-MO) hosted a roundtable titled “Main Street at Work: Empowering Small Businesses to Deliver Greater Affordability” in Kansas City, Missouri, to hear directly from small businesses on how the Committee can best support them.  

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“SCOOP: Rep. Roger Williams takes the House Small Business Committee on the road with a roundtable series"

Washington Reporter

Matthew Foldi

February 12, 2026

Rep. Roger Williams (R., Texas) is taking his Small Business Committee on the road. As the chair of the committee, Williams went to Kansas City with lawmakers from both parties to hear from small business owners about how his committee can support their growth.

The Williams-led “Main Street at Work: Empowering Small Businesses to Deliver Greater Affordability” hearing is the first stop of many that his committee will host. Williams will lead roundtables with small business owners and his colleagues on the committee across the country. His tour is called “The Open Road: Small Business Conversations Across Main Street America.”

Williams was joined by Reps. Mark Alford (R., Mo.), Kimberlyn King-Hinds (R., Northern Marina Islands), Troy Downing (R., Mont.), Derek Schmidt (R., Kansas), Gil Cisneros (D., Calif.), and Derek Tran (D., Calif.); for Williams’s inaugural roundtable was co-led by Alford. 

The lawmakers were joined at the National WWI Museum and Memorial by a variety of local business owners, including Erik Bergrud, the senior vice president for Public Policy of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce; David Goodson, the president of Impact Signs Awnings Wraps, Inc.; Tracy Whelpley, the director of regional impact for KC2026; Jeff Martin, the president of Martin Underground; Andy Rieger, the president of J. Rieger & Co. Distillery, and Will Ruder, the executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Greater Kansas City.

“Our Open Road roundtable in Kansas City reinforced what we know to be true: small businesses are the engine of the American economy,” Williams said following his first stop. “Hearing directly from small business owners about the challenges they face keeps the Committee’s work grounded in real-world experience. These conversations will continue to shape our efforts to cut red tape, lower costs, and ensure Main Street businesses have the freedom to grow and succeed.”

For Alford, Williams’s tour mirrored how he spent decades in local news working to bring information directly to his viewers. Following the roundtable, he noted that his committee’s “goal is simple: remove the obstacles and let them thrive. I’m grateful to the entrepreneurs and job creators across [my district] who showed up, shared their stories, and continue investing in our communities every single day.”

During the hearing, Williams noted that his committee has spent the past year “working to lower costs for Main Street by reducing red tape and restoring guardrails at the SBA. We have oversight of the SBA — the Small Business Administration — and it’s doing great. I mean, we’ve seen huge growth. We’re seeing a lot of regulations released. We even raised the limit the other day from 5 million to 10 million for small businesses to start or expand. We’re becoming very Main Street friendly, and the SBA is doing a great job. When I talk about bipartisanship, we’ve passed 30 bipartisan bills out of the House — 30 — to make the federal government work more efficiently for our small businesses nationwide, and to make sure that we compete against each other and not compete against the federal government. We don’t need to be doing that, and we’re trying to make that happen.”

Downing added during his remarks that small businesses are far from partisan. “Small businesses grow the economy, create jobs, and that’s not a partisan issue,” he said. “I’m glad we have colleagues with whom we can work to find solutions so small businesses can thrive. My wife and I are involved in a couple of small businesses. We take perfectly good, Montana malted barley and sweet corn and turn it into bourbon, so I’ve got a kindred spirit over here on the panel. I also have a small manufacturing company that makes athletic wear. So, another, Made in America, American source material. I understand the difficulties in accessing capital and hiring employees — we do a lot of exporting — when navigating this in our apparel company. So, I understand these problems, and I’ll say one of the biggest issues is access to capital. A lot of the things we are looking at with the reforms of the SBA and some other programs are: how do we make it easier for a small business to be able to finance what they are doing so they can grow the economy, so they can create jobs, so they can be everything that they are right now?”

Finally, Alford — whose district neighbors where Williams held the round table — added that “America is made up of small businesses. It is the fabric of America. It always has been, and Kansas City was built around small business. You think about Francois Chouteau, who came here in the western expansion to trap fur on the Missouri River — a small business. You think about Harry S. Truman, who set up a haberdashery shop not too far from here, Chairman, in downtown Kansas City. Many of you in this room, many of us on our panel today, who are small business leaders in our community, helping make a difference, are the backbone of our local economy and the heartbeat, really, of our communities…Folks, these are not abstract policies in debates. They affect whether a business can expand, hire workers, invest in new technology, or even keep its doors open and running.”

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