While everybody was busy hyperventilating over the down-to-the-wire legislative uber-drama of health care reform late last year, Congress was also relatively quietly getting its regular housekeeping chores done. Among said chores — which include such critical matters as the naming of post office buildings — was the disposition of those federal spending bills. There had [...]

What a difference an Administration makes (with apologies to Dinah Washington). It wasn’t so very long ago that the microenterprise development industry was hanging on like grim death, lobbying desperately to fend off the attempts of the Bush Administration to rid itself of the SBA Microloan program for good. The fortunes of microfinance in the [...]

Now that the federal government has its funding for the remainder of fiscal 2009 in place, Congress is free to turn its attention to figuring out the details of federal appropriations for fiscal 2010. It appears that the House Small Business Committee truly entered into the spirit of this, in a Budget Views and Estimates [...]

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 [...]

Congress finally passed its budget resolution last week, amid much partisan squabbling — of course. In small business land, Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairman John Kerry lauded a $101 million increase in SBA funding, while House Small Business Committee Ranking Member Steve Chabot (R-OH) lamented the fact that Congressional Democrats intend to [...]

The House and Senate both passed their separate budget resolutions before they went home for Easter break and, if you want to wade past all the political noise, you can actually find a few nuggets that may be of interest to microbusiness owners. On the matter of taxes, the House version of the budget does [...]

Here’s a shocking news flash for you: neither of the Chairpersons of the House or Senate Small Business Committees is happy with the President’s proposed fiscal 2009 budget for the SBA. In their separate View and Estimates letters, House Small Business Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velazquez and Senate Small Busines and Entrepreneurship Committee Chairman John Kerry [...]

President Bush is nothing if not consistent. A year of working with a Democratic Congressional leadership after the 2006 election results that came as a surprise to him did not produce any sort of epiphany. Neither has said Democratic Congressional leadership at all rendered President Bush irrelevant. So, it isn’t terribly surprising that his budget [...]

The SBA budget has been a bone of contention between Congress and the White House for the entire eight years of the Bush presidency. After all, this has been a period during which the SBA attained the dubious distinction of having the highest percentage of its budget cut of any federal agency. The top two [...]