Well, sir, you've hit upon the crux of my challenge in my job. Again, these are goals, but they're not necessarily set-asides. There's a slight difference. The set-aside is one of the tools we use to achieve the small business contracting goals. They're not compulsory in that there is no specific punishment for not achieving them. They are goals we would like to achieve and exceed, but that is not always the case. They apply to all federal agencies, although there are a few areas that are not subject to what we call the federal acquisition regulations, for a number of reasons, whether they be security-related or other reasons.
So how do we help the agencies achieve the goals, and what do we do when the goals are not achieved?
On the first part, we work with every agency to set their individual thresholds in each of the small business categories. That's for small business overall, which you correctly said is 23%. But then there are also the subcomponents--5% for women who own small businesses; 5% for small disadvantaged businesses; 3% for HUBZone businesses, and 3% for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses. We work with them to set individual agency goals, depending on what they're going to procure in the coming year and how they foresee working with small businesses, keeping in mind that the government as a whole needs to hit that entire number.
What do we do when the agencies do not achieve their numbers? That is something we're continuously looking at. What we do now is publish the score card so that people know which agencies have successfully achieved their goals and which agencies have not, and we then follow up. Any agency that does not achieve its goal must submit to my office a plan for how it is going to achieve the goal in the future. We then evaluate those plans and work with them to try to help them be in a position to achieve their goals going forward. But there's not a clearly outlined punishment, so to speak, for not reaching those goals.