The firms Ares Management LP and Apollo Global Management are two of the leading voices who urged Congress to allow lending companies to take on more risk earlier this year. And at a critical point where lawmakers are trying to avoid a government shutdown, private equity is back in Washington lobbying on behalf of business development companies (BDC), which are companies that provide loans to small and medium size businesses.

BDCs are in the midst of trying to get lawmakers to loosen the regulatory reins on their industry even after a substantial rebound since the housing crisis. And Congress looks as though it is ready to help. It never hurts that BDCs have financed a number of businesses in the home states of politicians when they couldn’t get loans from banks. Back in March, a provision attached to a bill allowed BDCs to double their leverage, a change that may allow them to be more profitable now, but riskier in the future.

Now BDCs are trying to petition the Securities and Exchange Commission to remove regulations that make it difficult for money managers and mutual funds to invest in the often publicly listed companies. The lobby is trying to get lawmakers to add a measure to the end of the year funding bill that would force the SEC to change this rule. However, this change would expose many more investors, including those saving for retirement, to the leveraged businesses that BDCs often lend to.

Jason Arnold, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets who follows BDCs, told Bloomberg: “The nature of the BDC model is to take credit risk, and at the next downturn, losses will absolutely pick up. But it isn’t crystal clear how high those losses will be. And in the short term, this change would be a big plus for investors and the companies.”

Some of the biggest BDCs are operated by companies like Goldman Sachs and KKR. The managers profit by charging BDC investors fees for managing the loan portfolios. Combined, BDCs manage $97 billion, which is more than double what they had under management five years ago.

Joseph Glatt, an Apollo BDC lawyer said: “The growth of private lending is good public policy -- providing needed capital to middle market companies that drive GDP growth.”

Much of the cash for these loans is drummed up by listing these BDCs on public exchanges. However, if mutual funds buy the stocks they have to include the BDCs operating expenses in the expense ratios they have to disclose to prospective investors. Because that increases the appearance of their costs, this is a deterrent for funds to invest in these types of companies, the lobby says.

There’s also a similar impact on the expense ratios of equity indexes, which usually wind up excluding BDCs for the same reason.

In September, Apollo and Ares wrote a letter to the SEC urging as to why they should be exempt from these regulations. They stated that the rules are "misleading and materially overstate" operating costs.

US representative Steve Stivers, an Ohio Republican, says that there is a good chance Congress will grant BDCs the relief that they are seeking because the issue isn’t "controversial". Regardless of whether or not the provision is included, Stivers believes that Congress is going to continue to pressure the SEC.

So just in case, for a moment, you had a foolish thought that we may have learned something from the types of risk taking endeavors we went on leading up to 2008, we’re happy to remind you – at least in this case – that that simply doesn’t seem to be true.