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 [...]

Last week, I told you about new legislation introduced by Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Committee Member Ben Cardin (D-MD) to improve the 8(a) program for “socially and economically disadvantaged” entrepreneurs — with a focus on federal procurement. Chairwoman Landrieu spent still more time on the issue of [...]

If you wanted to support a business in your community through a severe economic downturn, there are only two ways you could do that directly. You would have to either give the business owner money to invest in his business (equity capital) or you would have to buy things from that business. Most people are [...]

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.

Last week, the House Committee on Small Business dusted off one of its perpetual favorites among small business issues when Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez convened a hearing on small businesses in the federal procurement marketplace. As the Chairwoman pointed out in her opening statement, small business owners are saying that their biggest challenge isn’t access to [...]

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 [...]

Oversight hearings, which fell out of fashion during most of the Bush Administration, came roaring back when Democrats took over Congress in 2006. In fact, there were those who thought said Democrats would use said oversight hearings to exact their revenge against Republicans for nameless partisan crimes and misdemeanors. That didn’t happen, of course. Mr. [...]

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 [...]

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 has been almost seven long years but the SBA has finally published a set of proposed rules to implement the Women’s Procurement Program that has been a bone of contention for six of them. Unfortunately, the SBA studied the RAND Corporation’s research and came to the conclusion that there were only four relatively obscure [...]