Vice President Kamala Harris focused on small businesses during her Wednesday campaign stop in New Hampshire, but while she proposed lofty plans, U.S. veterans faced difficulties applying for the Small Business Administration’s “Veteran-Owned” certification.
That’s because the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) portal for obtaining special small business certifications — MySBA — has been broken for several weeks.
As a result, female entrepreneurs, minority business owners, and military veterans looking to take advantage of federal programs created especially for them can spend hours navigating the SBA application process before learning that the whole system is essentially broken.
A veteran of the U.S. Air Force first flagged the website malfunction to the Maine Wire after spending several hours trying to obtain a “Veteran-owned” verification for his boutique consulting firm.
“I’ve never asked for much from the federal government. But when I decided to apply for VetCert status, I had to waste hours of my time before learning from some guy at a call center in India that the website was broken and there’s no fix in sight,” he told the Maine Wire.
“Thanks for nothing, Joe,” the veteran said.
The Maine Wire was able to confirm by visiting the SBA website and calling a service representative that the portal is indeed non-functional and there is no definite timeline for it to return to service. The Air Force veteran, like others who spoke with the Maine Wire for this story, did so on the condition of anonymity out of concern that Maine or federal officials might seek reprisals against their businesses in retaliation for criticizing the administration.
The Biden-Harris Administration did acknowledge in July that its SBA certification system would be offline for a period of time, but the news was presented as a positive development reflecting the administration’s commitment to upgrading the level of services offered to SBA clients.
Biden cabinet member and SBA head Isabel Guzman announced that the agency would be overhauling the application process for small business owners to apply for contracting certifications. Such certifications are official recognitions from the agency, such as veteran-owned, woman-owned, minority-owned, etc., that help small business compete for federal contracts and grants.
During the Democratic presidential nominee’s remarks Wednesday afternoon at the Throwback Brewery in North Hampton, N.H., Vice President Harris said she would set a goal of receiving 25 million new small business applications by the end of her first term as president, though it wasn’t exactly clear from her remarks how those applications would be generated.
“I believe America’s small businesses are an essential foundation to our entire economy,” Harris told the crowd, saying that if elected one of her “highest priorities” will be to “strengthen America’s small businesses.”
Last month, the Biden-Harris administration announced that it had reached a total of 19 million small business applications, which would make Harris’ goal of 25 million applications a significant increase over the current pace of growth.
Part of her plan to achieve what she called this “very ambitious goal” is to expand the small business tax credit tenfold, from $5,000 to $50,000, in order to help entrepreneurs overcome the barrier of start up expenses.
For veterans confronted with the broken SBA website, those promises rang hollow.
“As a veteran and small business owner, I find it incredibly disappointing that the administration talks about supporting small businesses. In contrast, critical resources like the Small Business Administration’s certification portal for veteran-owned firms remain out of service,” said a 20-year U.S. Army veteran who operates a small business in the Bangor area.
“This portal is essential for veterans like me to access critical opportunities, and its weeks-long outage shows a concerning lack of attention to the issues that matter most to us,” he said.
“It is frustrating to hear Vice President Harris discuss plans for small businesses while problems like this go unresolved,” he said. “The government wants to support small business owners, especially veterans, but actions speak louder than words. Veterans often rely on these certifications to grow their businesses, compete for contracts, and build on the skills they learned while serving our country. How can we trust that small business issues are a priority when the systems we depend on have been left broken for so long, with no clear timeline for repair?”
Other elements of the plan announced by Harris include a proposal to streamline the tax-filing process by creating a standard tax deduction for small business, and to “take away some of the bureaucracy” hindering the growth of small businesses.
But Harris’ promise to reduce bureaucratic friction for small businesses is the exact same promise the Biden-Harris administration made when they disrupted the SBA portal.
Guzman, Biden’s SBA head, said in July that the new, “streamlined” application process, called MySBA Certifications, would enable business owners to apply with less paperwork and to apply for multiple certifications in one place.
While the new application tool is being developed by the SBA, however, the agency stopped accepting all contracting certifications beginning on Aug. 1 — meaning that as Harris touted her pro-small business policies in New Hampshire, no veteran or female small business owner could apply for certification from the agency.
The website’s disruption — reminiscent of the $2.1 billion Obamacare website debacle — doesn’t bode well for Harris’ plans to expand the federal government’s helping hand to small businesses.
According to the SBA, the new certification process is slated to launch some time in September, but there’s no hard deadline.
The Maine Wire called the Maine SBA office in Augusta on Wednesday to ask if the new certification tool had been launched, and was told that it has not yet been implemented. The Maine SBA employee was unsure of when the new process would be ready.
Harris’ attempted overture to small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs is perhaps an indication that many of the policies she’s put forward as a presidential candidate would have a negative impact on those business owners.
Price controls, higher corporate taxes, higher capital gains taxes, and a new tax on unrealized capital gains would all hamper economic growth and create a far more challenging environment in which to start or grow a small business.
Then there’s inflation and the rapid devaluation of the U.S. dollar, which has eroded the value of small businesses’ savings accounts and caused them to raise prices for their customers in order to survive.
One veteran who spoke with the Maine Wire on the condition of anonymity, as he currently has contracts that could be impacted by federal government employees, said the dysfunctional SBA certification system is all the more insulting to veterans when you consider how the Biden-Harris administration has bent over backwards to help asylum seekers and illegal aliens.
“The Biden-Harris administration’s failure to maintain a functional system for veteran business-owned designations is a slap in the face to every veteran who served this country,” he said.
“It’s clear where their priorities lie: pandering to illegal immigrants and pushing divisive DEI policies over supporting those who risked their lives for America. This isn’t just a bureaucratic glitch; it’s a glaring example of their neglect towards veterans who now face unnecessary hurdles in starting their own businesses,” he said. “When will they start prioritizing those who have already given so much?”
A U.S. Navy veteran with more than 20 years of service and several combat deployments said the broken SBA site was just one aspect of an overall decline in how veterans have been treated under the Biden-Harris administration.
“The decline of Veterans Services and Support by the current administration over the last 3 1/2 years is in direct correlation to the decline of the administration’s overall sentiment towards veterans,” the Navy vet, who also runs a small business in Maine, said.
“These services are earned through extreme sacrifice by veterans and their families defending our country and should NEVER be fixed ‘when we get around to it.’ Veterans deserve better from this administration,” he said.
“It’s unfortunate that veterans issues often play second or third fiddle to the ideological priorities of the Democrat majority when it comes to attention and spending,” said a veteran of the U.S. Marine corps and former small business owner.
“When it comes to our tax dollars our veterans should always be a top priority. Integration into the community, when a lot of these guys enlisted at 18, is not easy,” he said.
The campaign for Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, seized upon Harris’ Wednesday speech as an opportunity to attack the current administration’s record on the economy.
“We’ve already seen what Kamala’s economy looks like. It’s led to LESS opportunity, MORE regulations and MORE suffering,” the Trump War Room account wrote on X during the vice president’s speech. “No thanks.”
According to the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), a non-profit association of that conducts research and advocacy to advance the interests of small businesses, inflation is the single most important problem for small business owners.
In their July 2024 NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, NFIB reported that 25 percent of American small business owners said inflation was the single most important problem in operating their business, up four points from June.
Austin Theriault, the Republican running in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District to unseat incumbent Jared Golden (D), said in a statement to the Maine Wire on Wednesday that the economic policies of the current administration have made the lives of small business owners worse.
[RELATED: Golden, Pingree Steered $500,000 from “Inflation Reduction Act” to Democratic Activists…]
“As a small business owner, I know how difficult the current economic environment created by the Biden/Harris/Golden administration has been for Maine businesses,” Theriault said. “But in true Harris/Golden fashion, they’re saying one thing, doing another, and making our lives worse.”
“It’s time we elect real leaders who put people first, not follow the ways of Washington with more lip service,” he added.
Theriault, a first term state representative of Fort Kent and a former NASCAR driver, started his own motorsports consulting company after stepping away from the racetrack.
Spend, spend, spend.
Like she spent money bussing people in from Mass. to attend her event.
Trump Campaign Spox: Kamala Harris Rallygoers Freak Out After They’re Told They Can’t Leave Because Out-of-State Buses Were Delayed | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila
I think the famous Scottish pioneering adventurer Montgomery Scott summed this election up best when said “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me”.
The democrat spend policy’s are killing my small business.
People actually listen to this airhead who never had a private sector job even at McDonald’s?