Why Congress wants to kill the women-owned small business program

WOSB set-asides are growing, but they’re still a tiny slice of contracting

Photo by Connor Gan on Unsplash

Nancy Mace was the first Republican woman elected to the U.S. Congress from South Carolina. She got to Washington by starting her own public-relations business, then getting into political journalism. Now, from inside the institution, Mace is reporting on the misogyny in Congress and its Republican leadership.

“Women will never be taken seriously until leadership decides to take us seriously, and I’m no longer holding my breath,” Mace wrote in The New York Times in December.

Since then, Mace was the first legislator to call on Eric Swalwell to resign over sexual misconduct allegations. Last week, CNN reported that Mace had uncovered over $500,000 in Congressional sexual harassment settlements, paid for with taxpayer dollars.

The misogynists in Congress are now coming for government contractors. There are 22,486 contractors in SBA’s women-owned small-business program. Now opponents in Congress want to eliminate the program entirely. The bill—the Ending Discrimination in Government Contracting bill—would even stop SBA’s reporting on contracts to women-owned small businesses.¹

So far, the bill hasn’t gained much traction. The only Senate sponsor is Mike Lee, the senator from Utah who single-handedly blocked creation of a Smithsonian women’s museum. On the House side, the lone sponsor is Wisconsin Representative Glenn Grothman.

Grothman is an ardent opponent of Federal programs for women, advocating for a “way back to where America was in the 1960s.” He opposes women’s equal pay because “you could argue that money is more important for men.”

These aren’t legislators who just want to level the playing field between women-owned small businesses and other contractors. They don’t want women-owned small businesses to exist at all. And they’re using the current anti-DEI fervor to push an anti-women agenda. That’s the Congress that Nancy Mace warned us about.

How the WOSB program differs from DEI

The organization behind the Ending Discrimination bill is the Pacific Legal Foundation. PLF discussed its reasoning in National Review last week: “The same constitutional principle that forbids racial preferences in college admissions forbids them in awarding a bridge construction contract,” wrote Maddie Salamone, PLF policy counsel. That “constitutional principle” refers to the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions. The problem with PLF’s reasoning, though, is that the decision only addressed racial preferences. Sex-based programs, like the WOSB program, haven’t been struck down.

PLF is out on its own. When the Trump Administration banned “DEI discrimination” by Executive Order, it only banned “racially discriminatory DEI activities.” The White House hasn’t come for the WOSB program. In fact, SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler defended the importance of women-owned businesses during her confirmation hearing:

Senator Markey. Do you believe supporting women-owned businesses is DEI?

    Senator Loeffler. Senator, I’ve never said that. Senator, I can assure you that I will uphold the law. I was a women-owned business. I had a majority, minority women-owned business for a decade. I understand the importance of it.

The PLF article also ignores that the WOSB program is uniquely designed to survive Constitutional challenges. The drafters of the WOSB program learned from affirmative-action rulings from the late 1990s, like Adarand v. Pena. The WOSB program operates only in specific industries where SBA has found women-owned small businesses to be “substantially underrepresented.” (Set-asides for economically disadvantaged women-owned small businesses are authorized for industries where WOSBs are merely “underrepresented.” Those set-asides are rare.)

There are no WOSB set-asides for interior design, for example, because SBA hasn’t deemed that industry to be one where women-owned businesses are underrepresented. Same for plumbers, electricians, and dentists. WOSBs aren’t underrepresented in those industries either.

SBA updates the industry lists every five years. The most recent list from 2022 included 733 NAICS codes. That means almost 300 industries are excluded from the program.

The Federal government has achieved the goal of awarding 5% of contracting dollars to women-owned small businesses only twice: in 2015 and 2019. (The Ending Discrimination bill would end that goal.) The number of WOSB set-asides is far fewer than the set-asides in SBA’s other socioeconomic programs. In 2025, there were only 566 new set-aside awards using women-owned small-business set-asides. All the other programs were in the thousands.

Based on this data, it seems like agencies look at the WOSB program last. That might be because SBA has had a long backlog of certification applications. So the number of certified WOSBs is about a third fewer than certified service-disabled veteran-owned firms. In the draft House Appropriations report on the FY27 appropriations bill, the committee expresses “concern” over “a months-long backlog of applications” for WOSB certification.

It’s also because of the industry restriction, though. The FAR requires contracting officers to check SBA’s list to see whether the contract is in an authorized industry. That’s an extra step that isn’t required for the other programs.

Additionally, in the past WOSB set-asides haven’t been conducted on multi-agency contracts. The 8(a) program has 8(a) STARS, and the service-disabled veteran program has VETS. Both are huge governmentwide contracts that are available to all agencies. But there isn’t a governmentwide contract for WOSBs. That is changing, though. Both the OASIS+ and Polaris multi-agency contracts have WOSB pools.

The low number of WOSB set-asides also partially explains why the program hasn’t been reviewed—let alone struck down—by the courts. There just aren’t enough contracts to draw attention from conservative groups, other than PLF. And it’s hard to find a male-owned business that has standing to bring a lawsuit based on losing a contract.

The attack on a growing program

This existential threat comes just as the WOSB program is having its best year ever. The program is on pace to award the most set-asides in its history. Agencies are moving away from 8(a) sole-source awards, and the women-owned program is the biggest beneficiary. WOSB set-asides are up 60% from last year to this point, the largest increase for any set-aside program:

Even with that 60% increase, the number of WOSB set-asides (213) to date is still a small fraction of service-disabled veteran-owned set-asides (1,889) or small business set-asides (7,558).

And remember that WOSB set-asides are only authorized in NAICS codes where women-owned small businesses are substantially underrepresented. Service-disabled veteran-owned set-asides, on the other hand, have no such restriction. Of the 32,000 certified service-disabled veteran-owned firms, only 15% identify as women-owned. So, as the SDVO continues to outpace the women-owned program, women-owned firms become even more underrepresented.

On a broad basis, you can see the underrepresentation in the headline numbers. Women own 40% of U.S. businesses, but the Federal contracting goal is 5%. Even then, the government hasn’t met the 5% goal in six years.

That analysis compares the share of businesses to the share of dollars, which isn’t really fair. A fair assessment is better. Women-owned small businesses represented 20% of the small businesses that won government contracts in 2025. That percentage—20% to women—has gone virtually unchanged in 15 years. But it’s still half of 40%.

So, if women own about half the share of small-business contractors as they do of businesses generally, why do members of Congress want to eliminate the WOSB contracting program?

It probably won’t pass—at least this year

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former MAGA Republican from Georgia, delivered a stark assessment of Congressional leadership on her way out. “They want women just to go along with whatever they’re doing and basically to stand there, smile and clap with approval, whereas they just have their good old boys club,” Greene told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

That “old boys club” oversaw a 119th Congress that, for the first time since 2016, had fewer women than the Congress before it.

To me, that explains why the Ending Discrimination bill would kill the WOSB program. Research from Jonathan Brogaard of the University of Utah closely links the election of female legislators to new contracts for women-owned small businesses. “Female political representation causes an increase in government contracts allocated to WOBs,” Brogaard and his collaborators concluded.

As Congress has become more male—both in its full composition and at the leadership levels—it appears more willing to lump WOSB preferences into the broad category of “discrimination.” Senator Lee and Representative Grothman introduced a bill together two years ago, the Ending Racism in Government Contracting bill. But it didn’t have WOSB in it. The Ending Racism bill would have removed racial preferences from the 8(a) program. It gained eight cosponsors in the House. It wouldn’t have touched the WOSB program.

Now in 2026, with PLF’s support, Lee and Grothman added the elimination of the WOSB program and renamed the bill “Ending Discrimination.” They timed the bill to be introduced in the midterm election cycle. Evidently, they thought it might find support with voters. There’s some support for that. I talked with Jayna Rust about how even Democratic Party voters disagree with their party’s stance on government-contracting preferences.

But that voter preference was specifically about contracting programs based on race. Programs based on sex haven’t faced the same backlash. Part of the reason for that is, in other contexts, the preference works in the opposite direction. Colleges heavily recruit men, who apply and enroll at lower rates than women. Colleges would “skew to 65 percent female overnight,” if those programs ended, said Ted Mitchell of the American Council of Education, in an interview with the Washington Post.

It’s hard for me to see how, in a midterm election year, killing a program with just 500 set-aside contracts a year—less than 1% of all contracts—could be a winning issue. Small business owners tend to lean Republican. Why antagonize 40% of business owners over 1% of contracts?

For that reason, I don’t see the Ending Discrimination bill passing this year. It hasn’t gained any cosponsors. The bill wasn’t referred to the Senate Small Business Committee and hasn’t been docketed for a hearing.

Legislators who support small businesses would be better off spending their time on the Protecting Small Business Competitions Act. That bill would preserve the small-business Rule of Two. The Rule of Two requires agencies to set aside a contract for small businesses if at least two are competitive. The bill could be marked up by the House Small Business Committee as early as today.

Next year is not an election year, though. And PLF appears bent on taking down the WOSB program. So expect the bill to come up again. Nancy Mace, a former WOSB owner herself, is running for South Carolina governor, so she won’t be in Congress anymore. The future of the WOSB program will be up to the “old boys club” or the legislators who replace them.

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With 20 years of Federal legal experience, Sam Le counsels small businesses through government contracting matters, including bid protests, contract compliance, small business certifications, and procurement disputes. His website is www.samlelaw.com.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.

1. You might have heard that the same bill also would eliminate the SBA’s 8(a) program, but that’s not exactly true. I’m not here to defend the bill, but my read of it and its 2024 predecessor is that they delete the purpose of 8(a) while keeping the 8(a) contracting authorities intact. What the bill removes is the requirement that an 8(a) firm be owned by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals, or an Indian tribe, Alaska Native Corporation, or Native Hawaiian Organization. That would presumably leave the program open to small businesses regardless of their owners’ designations. It’s not clear how SBA would then select businesses for the program, though.