Let’s face it: fiscal responsibility rhetoric aside, the SBA’s funding is a drop in the bucket of the overall federal budget.

Which means, among other things, that no matter how much waste, fraud, abuse and duplication Congressional overseers are likely to ferret out, the savings involved are likely to represent a drop in the bucket of the federal government’s multi-trillion dollar red ink.

So it’s difficult to take inquiries into a drop-in-a-drop-in-the-bucket seriously when balanced against other federal expenditures — like the amount of money the federal government doles out to large corporations.

Every now and then, federal lawmakers are seized with budget cutting zeal, which inspires them to start hunting for wasteful spending in federal programs. That sort of thing is going on right now, in both the House and the Senate. Late last month, the House Committee on Small Business held a hearing on whether certain [...]

Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship held its own oversight hearing to examine fraud, waste, abuse and duplication at the Small Business Administration. Perhaps the largest difference between this hearing and that held before the House Small Business Committee a week earlier was that this hearing focused early on fraud. Because [...]

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 [...]

Meanwhile, everywhere else you look — whether it is at social safety nets or whether it is at a National Broadband Plan or whether it is at the push to increase U.S. exports — there appears to be no place in Obamaland for the sturdy American microbusiness.

In many ways, that really doesn’t matter.

Microbusinesses have managed to grow in number and increasing importance in the U.S. economy without a shred of support from the federal government and I would imagine they will continue to do so.

On the other hand, I’ll confess I’m disappointed.

During his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama announced his goal to double U.S. exports within the next five years. It seems a laudable goal for a CEO-in-Chief. The economy has been pretty much in the tank since before Obama took office. The job market is only just starting to show [...]

If you were placing bets with yourself about which Small Business Committee would venture to hold a hearing once the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released its broadband plan, your wait is over. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA) convened that hearing at the end of last month. For the most [...]

People in government say, fairly frequently, that America loves its entrepreneurs. If you turn off the rhetoric for a few minutes and look at the actual environment in which we dreamers are expect to operate, however, the actions of those policy makers tells a different story. There are any number of ways in which our [...]

It’s been said that doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, is a sign of insanity.

Congress does that all the time but nobody seems to think lawmakers are uniformly insane — well, except for the cranky, paranoid, political fringe nut-cases, of course.

The issue of federal procurement is a good example.

Now that Congress has taken care of the health insurance issue — at least for the time being — no doubt policy makers will consider themselves free to turn their attention to that other category of employer-provided social safety net: retirement savings. And, according to two reports released last week by the SBA Office of [...]