Home Press Center Strong Support Announced for SBA Proposed Rule

Strong Support Announced for SBA Proposed Rule

CEO Press Release Letter Today Urges That Discriminatory Set-Asides Be Strictly Limited (Falls Church, VA) A wide variety of groups and individuals, including Linda Chavez and Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, sent a formal letter to the Small Business Administration today, supporting the agency’s decision to restrict the use of gender discrimination in the award of government contracts. The administration recently announced a proposed rule that would limit carefully the use of set-asides for female-owned companies to those industries where it could be demonstrated that women were being denied contracting opportunities on the basis of sex. The letter noted the “intense pressure” that has been brought to bear on the agency to change the proposed rule so that set-asides would be more loosely available. But it said that the SBA must “stand its ground” in insisting that the constitutional restrictions the Supreme Court has placed on discriminatory set-asides be followed. The letter is attached. Among the signatories are public policy experts and representatives from small business, academia, and public interest legal groups, as well as organizations like the American Conservative Union, the Eagle Forum, Christian Coalition of America, Project 21, Concerned Women for America, additional grassroots activists, and of course the Center for Equal Opportunity. The letter concludes: “The taxpayers should not have to foot the steeper bill that inevitably results when a contract is awarded to someone other than the lowest bidder. Nor, most fundamentally, should any American be treated as a second-class citizen simply because of his sex or some other immutable characteristic.” The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit educational and research foundation. In particular, it studies civil rights, bilingual education, and immigration and assimilation issues Read Letter