Federal Government Surpasses Statutory Goal

U.S. small businesses reaped a record $69.23 billion in federal prime contracts last year, surpassing the previous high by almost 6 percent, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. The contracts represented 23.09 percent of federal prime contracting dollars and 43.7 percent of federal prime contracting actions in FY 2004.

The report from the Federal Procurement Data Center (FPDC) shows federal prime contracting in FY 2004 amounted to $299.9 billion on 9.97 million contracting actions. Small businesses garnered $69.23 billion on 4.36 million actions.

Of the $299.9 billion awarded in federal prime contracts, about $210.7 billion, or more than 70 percent, was awarded by the Department of Defense. Defense awarded $46.9 billion of its contracts, or about 22.27 percent, to small businesses.

The FPDC report showed that small disadvantaged businesses surpassed their 5 percent goal, registering 6.18 percent of total federal prime contracting dollars with $18.54 billion in prime contracts.

Participants in the SBA’s 8(a) Business Development program received $8.44 billion in contracts, or 2.8 percent of the total. Contracts to small businesses in economically distressed communities through SBA’s HUBZone program increased by 40 percent, to $4.78 billion.

The dollars to women-owned small businesses increased by $814.6 million to a record $9.1 billion, about 3 percent of the governmentwide total.

Contracts to service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses more than doubled, reaching $1.15 billion, up from $550 million in FY 2003.

The FPDC report also shows that 59.1 percent of SBA’s contracting dollars went to small businesses in FY 2004, up from 48.1 percent in FY 2003.