It looks like the SBA is finally going to implement that Women’s Federal Procurement Program that so many women’s groups were fighting about with the Bush Administration for eight long years. It all started back in 2000 when President Bill Clinton signed the Equity in Contracting for Women Act, which called for the SBA to [...]

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 [...]

After all the drama surrounding the down-to-the-wire Senate health care reform bill, which was finally passed on Christmas Eve, 2009, it’s a bit anticlimactic to have to report that President Obama is still having to urge Senate Democrats to ‘finish the job.’ There remain enough differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill [...]

The Obama Administration seems to be playing its own rather peculiar game with the nation’s small businesses, one that might best be described as I give with one hand and take away with the other. So, while Administration officials have been singing the praises of small businesses and describing the Presidents pro-small business proposals, there [...]

As amazing as it may seem in a Washington that often seems collectively afflicted with ADHD, the Obama Administration spent the entire week last week talking about small businesses. And it’s not even Small Business Week! Evidently, when the President said his renewed focus on job creation would start with small business, he meant it. [...]

President Obama may have proposed a three-year freeze on discretionary spending but among those items he considers worthy of increased investment is the U.S. Small Business Administration. The President’s budget proposal for fiscal 2011 includes an increase of $170 million for the SBA, which would bring the agency’s budget up to $994 million. Those on [...]

Even though there wasn’t much in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) that was specifically useful for microbusinesses, that is not meant to imply that the Obama Administration ignored small businesses completely. In fact, the ARRA included a fairly significant to-do list for the U.S. Small Business Administration, most of which was focused on [...]

Last week, the Obama Administration took the time to wish us all a belated Happy New Year, in the form of a week-long look back at what they were doing all year last year. This sort of political self-indulgence is not uncommon, of course, although it usually emanates from Capitol Hill. On the other hand, [...]

It was almost a year ago that The MicroEnterprise Journal was covering the how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was taking shape even before Barack Obama had been sworn into office. And what I was saying at the time was that there was not much in it that would directly benefit microbusinesses. Fast forward [...]

In case you were wondering, the health care reform bill currently being negotiated between the House and the Senate will almost certainly be useless for the majority of microbusinesses. There are a few good things the bill accomplishes. For example, it prohibits insurance companies from denying insurance to prospective purchasers on the basis of pre-existing [...]