Federal Agencies Continued to Exceed Small Business Contract Goals for Fiscal Year 2019

Each year, the Small Business Administration (SBA) publishes an annual scorecard to assess how well federal agencies are performing against their small business and socio-economic prime contracting and subcontracting goals. In addition to reporting agency-specific progress, the scorecard provides accurate and transparent contracting data.

The SBA works with each agency specifically to set their prime and subcontracting goals and then grades their performance in the resulting scorecard based upon these agreed upon goals. While the SBA individually works with each agency, the sum total of all goals must meet the twenty-three percent (23%) target for the federal government, as established by Congress.

In its scorecard assessment, the SBA will award a letter grade in accordance with its grading methodology for that particular year. Generally, an agency’s grade consists of a number of factors, including prime and subcontract awards to small business concerns, a comparison between the current year and the prior fiscal year of the number of small business prime contractors in various NAICS codes, and a peer review of the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU) office’s compliance with its requirements outlined in Section 15(k) of the Small Business Act.

Based on these factors and goals, in fiscal year 2019, the government-wide performance was rated an “A” as the government met its goals by 108.34%. To put this into perspective, government-wide, agencies awarded prime contracts to various small business at the following percentages of total prime contract dollars:

• 5% for small business (worth $132.9 B)
• 19% for women owned small business (worth $26.0 B)
• 29% for small disadvantaged businesses (worth $51.6 B)
• 39% for service disabled veteran owned small business (worth $22.0 B)
• 28% for HUBZones (worth $11.4 B)

Overall, fiscal year 2019 showed a prime contracting increase of more than $12 billion more in awards to small businesses compared to the previous year. Thus, there are still lucrative opportunities for various small business entities as specific agencies and government-wide continue to not only meet but exceed their small business contracting goals.