SBA Procurement Center Representatives: Watchdogs or Endangered Species? The guardians of small business contracting opportunities are dwindling in number and some of them are discouraged, according to their private comments. The number of SBA procurement center representatives has shrunk from more than 200 in the 1980s to 47 today. Procurement center representatives work with major contracting offices to encourage opportunities for small firms by recommending contracts for set-aside and discouraging unnecessary bundling. As part of the Bush administration’s anti-bundling strategy, SBA says PCRs should examine planned procurements and “identify alternative strategies to maximize the participation of small businesses in the procurement.” Some advocates and some PCRs say there are too few of them to do the job. But SBA Administrator Hector Barreto told the Senate Small Business Committee March 18, “We are not looking at additional PCRs at this time.” One PCR, responding to a survey conducted by Women Impacting Public Policy, said, “I am not sure that our Administrator understands exactly what we do in the field and how much stress the PCRs are under.” The 47 PCRs cover 255 contracting offices out of a total of 2,200 such offices, according to a White House fact sheet. The administration says those 255 offices award about 60% of all federal contract dollars. In the mid-1980s there were more than 200 PCRs, recalls Henry Wilfong Jr., president of the National Association of Small Disadvantaged Businesses and a former SBA official. “Every major buying facility had at least one PCR,” he said in an interview. “Some had more than one.” A PCR said in response to the WIPP survey, “Over the past years, the number of PCRs has dwindled, mainly because the agency has not found it important enough to fill those positions as they became vacant.” Fred Armendariz, SBA associate deputy administrator for government contracting and business development, insisted, “With better accountability and a better-trained workforce, we are doing more with less.” In 1992, he said, SBA had 68 PCRs and small businesses won $199 million in federal contracts; in 2001, with 47 PCRs, small firms won $234 million in contracts. Like his boss, Barreto, Armendariz said PCRs are not the key players in the administration’s anti-bundling strategy. “You’ve got somebody bigger than SBA,” he said. “You’ve got the president of the United States” spearheading the strategy. He spoke April 28 at a workshop sponsored by the SDB association in Arlington, VA. He said he is meeting with secretaries or deputy secretaries in all departments to emphasize their responsibility for making the anti-bundling strategy work. He said some of those top officials were not even aware that their department had an Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization. But Wilfong countered, “Nicey-nicey meetings are not going to get the job done.” Armendariz disagreed. He said the administration strategy emphasizes accountability of top officials in combating unnecessary bundling. “We want it to be top-down driven,” he declared. “Is more PCRs the answer? No. Accountability and leadership is always the answer.” WIPP member Susan Sawka, majority owner of Kylix Corp. of Costa Mesa, CA, sent questionnaires to all PCRs, asking them whether their numbers should be increased. She forwarded some of their answers to Set-Aside Alert with the respondents’ names deleted. Sawka said she received more than a dozen replies, then, “Somebody at SBA put out a memo saying they should not speak with me.” One PCR wrote, “The PCR is the only official empowered to stop a procurement when there exists a question as to the advisability of reserving that procurement for (a small business).” Barreto, in his Senate testimony, emphasized the role of agencies’ offices of small and disadvantaged business utilization and small business specialists in discouraging unnecessary bundling. “We really need to drill down more at the agency level, and that’s why the OSDBUs have an important role to play,” he said. But one of the PCRs said small business specialists “still work for the activity commander while the SBA PCR is for ALL small businesses and ALL small business programs.” (Emphasis in the original.) Another said of the small business specialist: “(T)here comes a time in the procurement cycle when the power of that person is exhausted. This is the point where the PCR steps in.” Two of the PCRs complained about inadequate resources. “Until the PCRs have funding to travel and train, they continue to become ever increasingly less effective,” one wrote. Armendariz said SBA recently shipped more than 30 new computers to PCRs to make it easier for them to monitor procurement opportunities online.