Small businesses garnered a record $69 billion in federal contracts

U.S. small businesses reaped a record $69.23 billion in federal contacts lat year, surpassing the previous high by almost 6 percent, Hector V. Barreto, administrator of the US Small Business Administration said last week. The contracts represented 23.09 percent of federal contracting dollars – the goal was 23 percent.

The report from the Federal Procurement Data Center (FPDC) showed federal contracting amounted to $299.9 billion on 9.97 million contracting actions. The over $69 billion dollars to small businesses accounted for 4.36 million contracting actions.

“The report shows that the government not only matched its own statutory goal, but it broke records by awarding more contracting dollars to America’s small businesses than ever before,” said Barreto.

Seventy percent of the nearly $300 billion was awarded by the Department of Defense. Small businesses were awarded nearly $47 million or about 23 percent of the defense contracts.

The FPDC report said small disadvantaged businesses surpassed their five percent goal registering over six percent of federal contracting dollars worth $18.54 million. Participants in the SBA’s 8(a) Business Development program received $8.44 billion in contracts (nearly three percent of the total) while contracts to small business in economically distressed communities through SBA’s HUBZone program increased by 40 percent to nearly five billion dollars.

The dollars to women-owned small businesses increased by over $814 million to a record $9.1 billion. Contracts to service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses more than doubled to over $1.1 billion.

The report also said that nearly 60 percent of SBA’s contracting dollars went to small businesses in FY 2004 up from just over 48 percent in FY 2003.