With no political impetus to light fires under the current Administration, this Clinton-era procurement program continues to languish in bureaucratic limbo

October 3, 2005 — Senator John Kerry (D-MA), top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, continues to agitate for implementation of the Woman-Owned Small Business Set-Aside Program while, at least from the looks of it, the Small Business Administration continues to stall.

The program stems from a Clinton-era piece of legislation under which the SBA was supposed to conduct a study to determine those industries in which women-owned small businesses were under-utilized as federal contractors and subcontractors with respect to their relative presence in that industry.

The SBA under the current Administration was clearly in no hurry to implement this program, finally getting around to releasing the initial report earlier this year. However, the report was found to be seriously flawed and the SBA was instructed to try again.

Women's groups have been quietly prodding the SBA about this program for years, with little notable results. Then, late last year, the U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce made a bit of a splash by filing a lawsuit against the agency and Administrator Hector Barreto, alleging that Barreto had admitted to Chamber president Margot Dorfman that he had no intention of implementing the program. That lawsuit is still pending.

Meanwhile, Senator Kerry had written to Administrator Barreto last summer, asking the Administrator when he was going to get with the program. Barreto responded by return letter that the SBA "target date" for releasing a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the commissioning of a new study was July 30, 2005. That letter from the SBA was dated July 29, 2005 and, according to Senator Kerry's letter, that RFP still has not been issued.

At the end of the day, all this singing and dancing and bureaucratically elegant ways of saying, "You can't make me" reduce to no study, no regulations, and no statutorily-mandated procurement program for women business owners. And, as Kerry pointed out in his letter to the SBA last month, the recently released fiscal 2004 procurement data shows that the federal government is still falling short of its women-owned business procurement goals.

"Women-owned businesses account for 30 percent of the companies in America, yet this Administration won't even get them 5 percent of federal contracts," said Kerry in a press statement. "And it's costing them big time -- $7 billion a year in lost contracts. I'm going to continue to hound the White House and hound the SBA until this program is implemented and women business owners are getting their fair share."

After more than five years of delays, it seems fairly clear that the SBA will avoid implementing this program for at least as long as George Bush is in office and Hector Barreto is running the agency. President Bush has paid no political price for this one, in spite of all the talk about the power of women business owners as a key swing vote. And, with this President, if there's no political price to pay, there's no motivation to do the job. That's the bottom line.