Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy urged the Defense Department to restore $260 million to Army and Air Force Small Business Innovation Research programs.

This funding was temporarily reallocated within the agency earlier this year with the understanding it would be restored once the emergency appropriations bill passed. Although the bill was signed into law on May 25th, the Democratic senators said many small research and development firms have yet to receive their funds and resume their projects.

  “SBIR contracts help create the technologies of the future that will help keep our troops and our country safer. Massachusetts firms are leading the way in developing innovative solutions, and I am hopeful that the Defense Department will restore the money they borrowed from this important small business program quickly, as promised,” said Kerry, Chairman of the Small Business Committee.

SBA has delivered a new disaster response plan to Congress, focusing on the agency’s strategy for rapidly ramping up its capacity to respond to large-scale disasters.

In a statement, the agency said it “has dramatically redesigned its Disaster program, quadrupling its loan processing capacity, enhancing customer service and increasing accountability.”

SBA has not properly tracked 8(a) contracts awarded for recovery from Hurricane Katrina, the agency’s inspector general said.

After reviewing a sample of 60 contracts awarded to 8(a) firms by the Defense and Homeland Security departments, the IG found 31 of them either had not been reported to SBA or had not been entered in SBA’s database of 8(a) awards, as required by regulation.

The IG said the reliability of 8(a) contracting data has been “a continuing problem” since at least 2000.

In response to the report, SBA said it plans to deploy a new database, but the auditors said that would be useless as long as information entered in the database is unreliable.