Set-Aside Alert news analysis:

13,000 small contractors left the federal market in FY2018

Largest one-year drop in small biz vendors in a decade

     The number of small business federal contractors has been declining for a decade--a trend that accelerated last year with a record of more than 13,000 small vendors leaving the federal market in fiscal 2018, according to a new Bloomberg Government study by Senior Data Analyst Paul Murphy.

      The exit of 13,158 small federal contractors last year was the largest such loss recorded in a single year.

      Last year’s decrease was the latest in a long slide, Bloomberg found. The total number of small business federal contractors has fallen from about 131,000 small firms in fiscal 2009 to about 88,000 in fiscal 2018.

      Those numbers reveal a 32% drop in the number of small federal vendors over the last decade.

      “This decline means that while contracts are getting bigger and bigger, we are creating an insular club where fewer and fewer businesses successfully compete for government contracts,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-MD,...more....