Nearly 3,000 small U.S. banks could be forced to dramatically curtail their lending because of losses on commercial real-estate loans, a congressional inquiry concluded.

The findings, set to be released Thursday by the Congressional Oversight Panel as part of its scrutiny of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, point to yet another obstacle for the slow-moving economic recovery. The small banks being threatened by loans they made for shopping centers, offices, hotels and apartments represent a major cog in the U.S. credit system, especially to entrepreneurs.

“The banks that are on the front lines of small-business lending are about to get hit by a tidal wave of commercial-loan failures,” said Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard University who heads the TARP oversight panel.

From 2010 to 2014, some $1.4 trillion in commercial real-estate loans is coming due. But for nearly half of those loans, the borrower’s debt is more than the property value, the panel said.

“The banks most at risk were never stress tested,” Ms. Warren said. “Their ability to withstand a coming storm has never been examined.”   In September at a congressional hearing, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said it hadn’t been feasible to stress-test thousands of banks

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