Commerce Secretary Gary Locke attempted to make headlines last week on a visit to Ellicott Dredges in Baltimore, MD, to chat up President Obama’s National Export Initiative. In his State of the Union address in January, the President vowed to double U.S. exports within the next five years and, as with several other items intended to rescue the economy, the Administration is depending to a large degree on small businesses to do it. Since Ellicott does a brisk overseas business, such that they have had to double their capacity during the current downturn, what better poster child for small business exporting? “There is no reason why thousands of other companies throughout the United States can’t do exactly what Ellicott has done,” said Locke during a town-hall style meeting with Maryland companies. Unless, that is, they don’t want to.

This initiative is composed of a three-pronged approach: faciliting opportunity, improving export-related access to capital, and enforcing international trade law to even the playing field for U.S. small business. The one thing they don’t offer to do (and who can blame them) is to manufacture more hours in the day. But that’s what microbusiness owners say they need to get into exporting; developing a foreign market was too time consuming and that time could more profitably be spent on domestic business development. So, will this National Export Initiative make the exporting process less time consuming to enter into, or does all that assistance translate into helpful folks trying to cram microbusinesses into another bit of economic infrastructure into which they don’t fit? And, because of all that, widespread participation in this initiative by microbusinesses is unlikely.