Senate Panel to Draft Contracting Legislation Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Small Business Committee say they will try again this year to pass legislation overhauling small business contracting programs, focusing on making agencies accountable for reaching their procurement goals. At a July 18 hearing, Maryland business owner Magdalah Silva recounted her conversation with a small business official at one agency: “I asked him, ‘What happens to you if you don’t meet your goals?’ He said what happens is that he walks around to the other side of the table and gives himself a stern talking-to.” Both Chairman John Kerry, D-MA, and the ranking Republican, Olympia Snowe, ME, were sharply critical of many agencies’ failure to reach socioeconomic goals. The government has never achieved the 5% goal for woman-owned firms or the 3% goals for service-disabled veteran and HUBZone companies. “For some reason the agencies are totally resistant to include small businesses in those prime opportunities,” Snowe said. She was especially critical of the Defense Department’s failure to meet the 3% goal for service-disabled veterans. (See next story.) Both senators said their legislation will attempt to enforce accountability for meeting goals. In addition, they said action is needed to rein in contract bundling and to require large primes to abide by their subcontracting plans and pay subcontractors on time. Last year the committee unanimously approved legislation in those areas, but it never came up for a vote in the Senate. Snowe said President Bush’s 2002 initiative to stop unnecessary bundling “has yet to be followed.” Kerry said prime contractors’ “bait and switch” tactics, naming small firms as subcontractors on their proposals but never giving any work to those firms, amounts to “fraud.” He has proposed penalties for primes that do not follow their subcontracting plans. Snowe acknowledged she is “frustrated” that these same issues come up year after year. “We seem to confront the same problems, the same resistance, the same inability to get these [small business] programs right.” Kerry indicated he will move to overturn SBA’s five-year recertification rule. Last year the committee backed annual recertification of small business eligibility. “Why should we allow big businesses to get small business set-aside contracts for one day, let alone for five years?” he asked. The House has passed legislation that would raise the governmentwide small business contracting goal to 30%, from the present 23%, and increase goals for woman-owned businesses and small disadvantaged businesses to 8%, from the current 5%. The Bush administration opposes the increases as “unrealistic.” The House legislation, H.R. 1873, would also broaden the definition of contract bundling to cover new work as well as the consolidation of existing contracts and to include construction contracts over $65 million. (SAA, 5/18)