In this episode of The Center for USA Lending's The Lending Brief, sponsored by Allocore, we're joined by Sarah Cunningham, partner at Summit Consulting and founder of its financial management practice, and Shelley Metzenbaum, founding president of the Volcker Alliance and director of the Better Project, for a conversation about the question federal credit has never fully answered: are these programs actually doing what they were designed to do?

Both are co-authoring a chapter on credit program performance for a forthcoming book on federal lending, and they bring a sharp, practitioner's eye to why measuring loan volume and default rates is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. They walk through what a genuine performance framework looks like — from tracking borrower characteristics and intermediary performance to connecting financial data with mission outcomes — and make the case that the $5 trillion federal lending portfolio may be one of the most underutilized early warning systems for economic stress in the country. Plus, Doug previews the Federal Credit Lab's November 9th launch as a critical first step toward making that vision a reality.

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