“Addressing the crisis in health insurance” will be the top priority for Congress’s Small Business Committees, according to their chairs.

Rep. Donald Manzullo (R-IL), chairman of the House committee, and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), the new chair of the Senate committee, issued a joint statement pledging to work together on that and other issues.

“Clearly, small businesses are staring a health insurance crisis in the eye as the ranks of the employed but uninsured continue to increase, undermining growth, unraveling benefits, and – increasingly – exceeding their ability to pay,” Sen. Snowe said.

“The surging cost of health insurance has become a crisis for America’s small employers, and it will again be the focus of our work here in Congress,” Manzullo said.

Snowe said other priorities will include relieving burdensome regulation and excessive taxes and opening new opportunities for entrepreneurs.

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Allan Burman, former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, may become chief of acquisition in the new Department of Homeland Security, Government Executive magazine reported.

Burman served in the administrations of President Reagan and the senior President Bush. He was an early advocate of performance-based contracting. He is currently president of Jefferson Solutions, a Washington consulting firm.

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Boyd Rutherford, head of GSA’s small business office, is slated to join the cabinet of Maryland’s Republican governor-elect, Robert Ehrlich Jr.

Ehrlich announced he will nominate Rutherford to be secretary of the state’s Department of General Services.

Rutherford served as the federal GSA’s associate administrator for enterprise development since September, 2001.

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The Air Force Standard Systems Group has awarded four 8(a) companies information technology services contracts that are worth up to $100 million over the next five years.

Ingenium Corp., AC Technologies Inc., Business Technologies and Solutions Inc. and Smartronix Inc. were awarded the indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts.

Work will be performed primarily at Standard Systems Group headquarters at Gunter Annex in Maxwell AFB, AL, and the Materiel Systems Group at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.

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Military services will share more bases after the next round of base closings in 2005, says Ray DuBois, deputy undersecretary of defense for installations and environment.

DuBois said stationing members of different services on the same base and combining different services’ business operations will increase efficiency and reduce costs.

In a December briefing for reporters, he said the secretary of defense will take a more active role in the base-closing process. In the past, each service made its decisions independently. He said Secretary Rumsfeld has ordered the services to “maximize joint use.”

The Defense Department has estimated it has 20% to 25% more capacity than it needs.

The secretary will recommend base closings in May 2005. After a review by a citizens’ committee and the president, Congress will accept or reject the closings by December of that year.

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SBA and the Department of Defense have completed the integration of their contractor databases, PRO-Net and the Central Contractor Registration. The linkage allows vendors to enter information in both databases simultaneously. SBA says this will save new small business registrants about 30 minutes during the initial registration process.

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SBA does not adequately review the credit decisions made by banks in its Preferred Lender Program, the General Accounting Office said.

GAO said SBA’s reviews of those lenders “are not designed to evaluate financial risk, and the agency has been slow to respond to recommendations made for improving its monitoring and management of financial risk—posing a potential risk to SBA’s portfolio.”

Banks in the Preferred Lender Program are permitted to make government-guaranteed loans without prior approval from SBA. Preferred lenders tend to be the largest lenders in SBA’s 7(a) loan program, accounting for slightly more than half of 7(a) lending.

“The current PLP review involves a cursory review of documentation maintained in lenders’ loan files rather than a qualitative assessment of lenders’ decisions on eligibility or creditworthiness,” GAO said. But it said SBA has made progress in its oversight program.