Of everything the federal government does that is supposed to work in support of small businesses, the one that is perhaps most direct is federal procurement. Not only is it the most direct, it has the potential to be the most effective. The best and most rational way for small businesses to increase their revenues is to increase their sales. The United States government is the worlds top purchaser and it buys everything. Unfortunately, as with everything else the federal government tries to do to help small businesses, federal procurement does not live up to its small business support potential, for a few different reasons. To begin with, most procurement officials will tell you that microbusinesses lack the capacity to fulfill a government contract — thus excluding 90% of the nation’s small businesses and making it difficult to meet its own procurement goals.

At the other end of the spectrum, as a report released last week by the GAO demonstrates, there are too many ways in which federal bureaucrats seem able to thwart Congressional attempts to help small businesses sell to the feds. Back in 1978, Congress amended the Small Business Act, requiring each federal agency to create an Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU), whose director would report directly to either the first or second banana of that agency. The thinking behind the reporting requirements was that the directors of the OSDBUs would be better able to advocate effectively for small businesses, and would be less easily ignored within the framework of a large federal bureaucracy, if they had ready access to the top official(s) in the agency. Unfortunately, not all federal agencies are in compliance, sometimes in sly and slithery ways. Federal procurement needn’t necessarily be a closed door to microbusinesses, if certain procedural reforms were to happen. But there’s little chance of that when Congress can’t even persuade government bureaucrats to comply with existing small business friendly procurement rules.