“The Biden administration has been pushing for more federal contracting dollars to go to small and disadvantaged businesses. The specific goal is for an additional $100 billion to such businesses over the next five years. For how agencies can start to reach this goal, the Acting Director of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Lesley Field spoke to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin…”
“Tom Temin: And just if you would briefly review some of the parameters because there are percentages for small businesses, and then there are percentages for [SDBs] within the small business ranks.
Lesley Field: Exactly. So according to SBA’s scorecard, the federal government spent $145 billion in fiscal year ’20 with small businesses. So that equates to about 26% of eligible dollars. A subset of these awards go to small disadvantaged businesses, or SDBs. And in FY ’20, that was almost over $59 billion and about 10%. So that helps to sort of understand what those numbers mean. But agencies are also working to meet or exceed their goals for the other socioeconomic small businesses, such as women-owned small businesses, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, and of course, contractors and HUB Zones…”
“Tom Temin: But that can help you drive more dollars to existing contractors. I think the spirit of this though, is also to bring more companies that we’re not doing business with at all, or may not even be aware of into the federal market.
Lesley Field: Exactly. And so we were looking at the data just to make sure that we were reaching, perhaps folks that had not done business with us. But we also really encourage engagement. We’ve talked about our myth busting series before that. Industry outreach can be critical, especially in attracting new entrants to the market. We also want to make sure our small business specialists and our team at SBA are engaged. We also want to focus on Ability One, to identify opportunities to increase employment for persons with disabilities. So we are looking at data driven outreach just to make sure that we’ve got online dialogues and crowdsource activity so that we can look at what the industry and what the marketplace is saying, and then using supplier feedback surveys, right? So once we get some new entrants into the market, and even with existing entrants, we can use our Acquisition 360 tool to find out how that experience went so that we can make improvements if necessary…” Read the full interview here.
Source: How the boost in federal contracting with small and disadvantaged businesses will actually happen – By Tom Temin, February 1, 2022. Federal News Network.
