The government shutdown appears to be dulling loan application approval rates at small financial institutions.

Credit unions approved 40.1 percent of loan applications in December, tying an all-time low figure, down one-tenth of a percentage from November, according to the Biz2Credit Index, which reviews more than 1,000 small business credit applications made via an online lending platform.

Business loan approval rates dropped three-tenths of a percent at regional and community banks in December. Small bank approvals slipped below the half-way mark to 49.9 percent following the month of November when 50.2 percent were approved.

“With all the political quarreling in Washington, little has been reported about the impact on small businesses because SBA lending has stalled,” Biz2Credit CEO Rohit Arora said in a statement. “The government shutdown really has begun to hurt small companies in search of capital.”

The shutdown has closed the U.S. Small Business Administration for the past two weeks, which has put a halt to what had been a strong lending year in 2018.

“With the SBA closed, there is now a backlog of companies awaiting funding primarily from small banks,” Arora said. “At this point, it will take months for regional banks to recover from this jam and restore the flow capital to small businesses.”

Not all the news is bad.

The December approval percentage for big banks (assets of $10 billion-plus) rose one-tenth of a percent from October’s figure of 26.9 percent to 27 percent.

Institutional lenders inched slightly up to 64.8 percent in December, up one-tenth of a percent from 64.7 percent in November, while loan approval rates among alternative lenders dropped from 56.7 percent in November to 56.6 percent in December.

“As long as the government shutdown does not continue much longer, we are still in a good place,” Arora said. “If SBA lending stalls much longer, it will negatively impact small companies looking for funding, slowing down the strong growth we’ve seen in this part of the economy.”