Dear SBIR Gateway Insider,

Sorry to intrude so soon after the last Insider, but there is some action in SBIR land. Also I've been flooded with questions so I'll give you a quick update now and answer many of your questions in the next issue to follow soon.

In this issue:

• Senate Passes Bill To Extend SBIR/STTR For 6 Months

Senate Passes Bill To Extend SBIR/STTR For 6 Months

Today (October 26, 2009), the Senate passed S. 1929 that extends SBIR/STTR for all agencies (except DoD) as well as other small business programs for 6 months, expiring on April 30, 2010. This bill does not effect the earlier DoD SBIR/STTR 1 year extension passed by Congress as part of the DoD 2010 Authorization expected to be signed by the President on Wednesday.

Mary Landrieu (D-LA), chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship had this to say about this new extension bill (S.1929):

"A six-month extension of the SBA and its programs - including the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs - ensures that the agency has the stability it needs to provide our innovators and job creators the assistance they need to remain successful. While we continue to make progress on all of our reauthorization measures - SBIR/STTR, SBA's loans and venture capital programs, contracting assistance, and management counseling - this temporary reauthorization will help keep America's 29 million small businesses running through the holiday season. "

The bill will now be sent to the House to be evaluated by the House Small Biz Committee and its chair Nydia Velazquez, who will make changes or approve the bill in its current form and send to the whole House for a vote. Her committee has been reluctant to extend SBIR for any reasonable length of time, so it will be interesting to see if she and the House will go along with the Senate's bill of 6 months. Calculating that Congress will be very busy through November (absent during Thanksgiving week), and generally off as early as possible in December, it would be unlikely that any reauthorization could be completed before the end of the calendar year.

For those of you DoD SBIR'ers, you can relax for a while. The President is expected to sign the DoD Authorization on Wednesday, and that includes extension of DOD SBIR/STTR/CPP for 1 year (ending Sept 30, 2011). There was a great controversy to this bill, not because of SBIR but due to the addition of the "Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes bill" being included in this authorization. It caused a backlash by the Republicans who usually support defense, and you can expect certain sections of the press to report on the signing of this defense authorization bill to be called the "Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes bill".

So regardless of the new media title, the defense bill will be signed into law on Wednesday and the DoD SBIR is good until at least September 30, 2010.

I'm sorry I can't answer each of your questions personally (although I try), we'll publish many of the most popular ones in the next issue which should follow as soon as we receive word of the extension, aka "CR".

Sincerely,

Rick

Rick Shindell
SBIR Gateway
Zyn Systems
40 Alderwood Dr.
Sequim, WA 98382
360-681-4123
[email protected]
www.zyn.com/sbir

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