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USDOT earns A+ for Small Business support

Last Friday (Aug. 1), the Small Business Administration announced that, in Fiscal Year 2013, the federal government reached a key goal for the first time in eight years, with agencies awarding 23.5 percent of their contracts to U.S. small businesses.

Here at DOT, we're proud to be a leader among those agencies, earning a grade of "A+" on our annual Small Business Procurement Scorecard. In fact, we nearly doubled the federal average by awarding more than 43 percent of our procurement contracts to small businesses.

Much of the credit for this achievement goes to our Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU), which provides a range of support to help small businesses compete more effectively within the transportation industry. As OSDBU Director Brandon Neal said, "It's one thing to say that small businesses are America's 'engines of growth' and 'job creators;' it's another to give those economic engines the opportunity to do what they do best. We're happy to have been able to do that year after year."

DOT's record demonstrates that consistency. From FY 2009 --the first year SBA assigned letter grades to agencies-- through FY 2012, DOT earned an "A" on each scorecard. And although we still sought the elusive "A+," it was a pretty good streak.
Now, with FY 2013, we've raised our performance and earned the coveted "A+," and you can bet we'll do whatever we can to make this the start of a new and better streak.

Because when we support America's small businesses, they provide value to government and to the economy in return. As SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet said, "Small businesses get the revenue they need to grow and create jobs, and the federal government gets the chance to work with some of the most responsive, innovative and nimble companies in the U.S. while the economy grows."