And you thought the Small Business Administration was supposed to be fighting for the little guy.
But with half it's budget slashed in the last four years, the SBA is under pressure to streamline.
So one way to scale the job to the resources seems to be to simply say there are fewer small small business in the U.S. than we thought.
A year ago, the SBA proposed changing from revenue-based standards to measuring firms from 50 to 1,500 employees. About half of the 4,500 comments the agency received on the proposal were opposed to it, and the effort was abandoned.
But it's back. And some small business lobbyists are up in arms. Under last year's proposal, 34,100 new small businesses would have lost their small-business designation.
"Instead of bidding against 50 companies, I may be bidding against 300 companies. It's always harder when you have to compete with large companies," Annetta Vickers, owner of TAB Co. Inc. told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
It may be up to Congress to stop it from happening.
To Comment, E-mail: restructure.sizestandards@sba.gov
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