Last week, the Contracting and Technology Subcommittee of the House Small Business Committee held a hearing to look into what needs to be done to ensure that small firms get their fair share of contracting awards to be made under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The issue is fairly important. Since there is relatively [...]

Late last month, the National Small Business Association (NSBA) sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the signature of organization president Todd McCracken, urging Congress to consider a number of small business provisions for inclusion in the forthcoming economic stimulus package. Among them were setting aside 23% of infrastructure stimulus contracting for small [...]

Now that President-elect Obama has added a bit more in the way of detail to his public pronouncements about his economic plan, we learn that he hopes to embark on the largest series of public works projects since FDR. Repairs to highways and bridges, renovations to schools, access to electronic medical records for hospitals and [...]

It’s easy to complain about the lack of apparent interest in small businesses during this economic crisis. But the numbers provide one explanation of that curious silence.

When you get past the microbusiness employers and look at the rest of the small business firm size classes, their job creation and job loss numbers look fairly stable, either producing net job gains or breaking-even.

From the point of view of the folks in Washington, it probably looks like small businesses don’t really need any help.

The House will either return to work after the election or will simply adjourn and allow the 110th Congress to become a part of history, but that hasn’t stopped several House committees to continue doing the people’s work. Last week, the House Small Business Committee held its fifth hearing to examine what Congress can do [...]

It’s looking pretty grim out there. A lot of microbusiness owners, watchers and advocates (myself included) were anticipating that microbusiness owners could cheerfully weather any credit crunch dealt by Wall Street, in light of the fact that microbusiness owners generally get by without access to credit under the best of circumstances. But as consumers pull [...]

When Congress finally got its act together to get a new Farm Bill to the President’s desk earlier this year, there was much cheer among rural development advocates, thanks to the mandatory funding for the new rural microenterprise development program written into the legislative language. That mandatory funding provision was important. Congress has a history [...]

Lest anyone forget that this is an election year, and not just for the highest office in the land, Congressional Democrats have continued to ignore President Bush and investigate what sorts of things they might want to include in a second economic stimulus package. For example, late last month, the House Small Business Committee held [...]