Proposed SBA Budget Holds No Surprises
Feb 11th, 2008 | By Dawn R. Rivers | Category: Politics & PolicyPresident Bush is nothing if not consistent. A year of working with a Democratic Congressional leadership after the 2006 election results that came as a surprise to him did not produce any sort of epiphany. Neither has said Democratic Congressional leadership at all rendered President Bush irrelevant. So, it isn’t terribly surprising that his budget proposal to fund the Small Business Administration for fiscal 2009 looks remarkably similar to the one he submitted for fiscal 2008 — up to and including identical funding levels for the entrepreneurial development programs, Microloan and the PRIME grant programs. Since this year’s budget proposal looks very much like a rerun of last year’s budget proposal, expect a rerun of the appropriations process. No doubt Congress will increase funding for most of the business assistance programs. On the other hand, given a projected budget deficit of $400 billion or more, it seems unlikely that they will do much more than that.
