I sure can.
We separate their goals. There's a goal for small business participation in contracts government-wide; that's the 23% I mentioned. There are also four sub-goals: 5% for women-owned small businesses, 5% for small and disadvantaged businesses, 3% for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, and 3% for what we call HUBZone businesses, which are historically underutilized business zone businesses.
Now, those are goals, but there aren't necessarily set-aside programs with each one. The tools to achieve those goals are different by category. We do have set-aside programs for service-disabled veterans, for small and disadvantaged businesses, and for HUBZone companies. When two or more small businesses may compete for any contract, it should be set aside for small businesses.
The use of the actual tools within each category is slightly different. I just wanted to make that distinction somewhat, because in preparing for this, I read some of the past testimonies of individuals in front of your committee, and occasionally the percentage goals and the term “set-aside” had been conflated.
Some of the challenges we face include educating the agencies--each individual agency, down to the actual individual contracting officer--as to when a set-aside is appropriate to use. We don't put pressure on them to choose a particular program or to strive for a particular goal when multiple categories would qualify for that procurement, but we want them to, first of all, set aside for small businesses and then look at the socio-economic categories in groups to see if any of those are the most appropriate to focus on for that procurement.
Some of the challenges, again, include educating them and helping to give them the information, because the regulations and the statutes can sometimes be burdensome on both the agencies and the small businesses in terms of understanding how to compete most effectively. I'm sure this is true with any government. That's where the challenge comes in.