Feds Still Touting Government Procurement
Jun 14th, 2010 | By Dawn Rivers Baker | Category: Politics & PolicyIf 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 not altruistic enough to simply give money away like that, which leaves buying things. And the more things you buy from that business, the more help you are giving them. On the surface, it looks like it ought to work beautifully, doesn’t it?
That’s the basic rationale behind the never-ending push by federal lawmakers to get the federal government to buy things from small businesses. And there was yet another push to the push last week, in the form of the the Section 8(a) Improvements Act of 2010 (S. 3458), introduced by Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Committee Member Ben Cardin (D-MD). The bill does quite a bit of tinkering with size standards and eligibility for 8(a), to allow firms to stay in the program longer, and beefs up training and technical assistance. But the bill does nothing to simply 8(a) application procedures or make the procurement processes themselves more small-business friendly, so I don’t know how helpful it will be to large numbers of “socially and economically disadvantaged firms.”
