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Karen G. Mills Confirmed as Small Business Administration Head

By Marc Tracy

It is now absolutely official: earlier this morning, a bit over a day after being unanimously passed by the Senate Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee, Karen G. Mills was confirmed, via unanimous consent, by the Senate and became the 23rd Administrator of the Small Business Administration. We think this is a good thing.

Mills had said at her confirmation hearing, "The sum of my experience is this: I am a believer in American small business. I am a believer in America’s ability to manufacture goods and services that are world class, and I am a believer in America’s spirit of entrepreneurship. This spirit is one of our country’s greatest assets and we need to cultivate it today, more than ever.”

The earlier confirmation hearing appears to have gone swimmingly (click here for video of it). Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), the committee chairwoman, amusingly remarked, "I know that we will all be relieved that after reviewing Ms. Mills’ and her husband’s joint federal and state returns for 2003 through 2007, the tax returns look to be in order and complete in all material respects." More seriously, Landrieu lauded Mills's record of balancing "her role in private, for-profit enterprises with active involvement in her community," particularly in helping Maine's economic developmen, as well as her stellar C.V. (Landrieu also confirmed what we had long supposed: that Mills was in fact specifically recommended for the job by the committee's ranking member, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Me.).)

At the hearing, without going into specifics, Mills pledged to implement those provisions of February's stimulus package affecting the SBA (including the new emergency microloan guarantee program, which was supposed to have been implemented already).

It wouldn't be America if everyone were happy, and Lloyd Chapman, the curmudgeonly (in a good way!) president of the American Small Business League, took to the digital pages of the Huffington Post to express his skepticism. Chapman, who has previously criticized Mills's selection due to her association (and, he argues, identification) with the venture capital industry, predicted, "Mills will most likely ignore the seven years of federal investigations that found hundreds of billions of dollars in federal small business contracts actually went to Fortune 500 firms and thousands of other large businesses" (a phenomenon we've reported on, here for example).

He concluded, "She will likely bring the SBA solutions for 'problems' that are non-existent for 99 percent of small businesses. Solutions that will include phrases like 'angel investors,' the ever popular, 'increasing access to capital,' and the latest phrase for wealthy investors looking to dominate government small business contracting programs, 'investing in America.'"

We agree with Chapman that focusing on "increasing access to capital" is in fact likely to help most only the top one or so percent of small businesses. However, we don't think it's unimportant. More importantly, we have hopes that Mills--whose record suggests, more than anything else, intellectual rigor, competence, and empiricism--already understands, or will quickly come to understand, that what most small businesses need is an economic climate in which it is easier for them to hire and keep employees and in which consumers are likely to start spending money at their businesses again. The great work begins.

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