Small businesses may soon receive a fairer shake from the Pentagon if bipartisan efforts by a couple of senators succeeds. Democratic Senator Martin Henrich of New Mexico and his Republican counterpart Joni Ernst of Iowa have filed a bill to reauthorize and improve the Defense Department’s Mentor-Protégé Program that was allowed to expire last year.
Joe Gould reported on the legislative initiative for DefenseNews:
“Small businesses often struggle to overcome the hurdles of bureaucracy and fail to break through the existing network of suppliers to the Department of Defense, which is the single largest department in the federal government,” Heinrich, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, said in a statement.
“This bill gives small businesses an opportunity to partner with larger defense companies who have the resources and experience to navigate the procurement process and compete for contracts, which will create good paying jobs in our communities and provide better products for the Department of Defense.”
“Small businesses often struggle to overcome the hurdles of bureaucracy and fail to break through the existing network of suppliers to the Department of Defense, which is the single largest department in the federal government,” Heinrich, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, said in a statement.
“This bill gives small businesses an opportunity to partner with larger defense companies who have the resources and experience to navigate the procurement process and compete for contracts, which will create good paying jobs in our communities and provide better products for the Department of Defense.”
The Pentagon has provided roughly $450 million to mentor firms since the program’s inception through fiscal 2017. The DoD provided $23 million in FY17, $20 million in FY18, $30 million in FY19, and it proposed $32 million in the FY20 budget.
The Heinrich-Ernst bill tweaks the original program by requiring an independent third party to conduct a study and provide recommendations for improving the program based on previous data and data to be accumulated over the next three years of the program.
