U.S. Sen. John Curtis meets with audience members during a networking break at the Small Business Expo at Davis Technical College. (Brice Wallace, Salt Lake Business Journal)
The audience listens to presentations during the Small Business Expo at Davis Technical College in Kaysville. The event was hosted by U.S. Sen. John Curtis. (Brice Wallace, Salt Lake Business Journal)
Businesses’ approach to the federal government at one time was simple: “Get out of our way. We can handle things.”
But that attitude nowadays is not enough, according to U.S. Sen. John Curtis, who organized a recent small-business expo in Kaysville and pushed for giving small businesses a predictable environment and helping them access opportunities for federal government work.
The event featured discussions about federal government programs and obstacles — such as navigating the sea of government acronyms — with Curtis leading the charge for an understandable, unsurprising, dependable federal government that can benefit small businesses.
“If we’re not, as a federal government, giving you a predictable landscape, I don’t know how you do it,” Curtis said at the event, which took place at the Davis Technical College. “Like, seriously, I don’t know how you navigate the last 18 months of tariffs. ‘They’re 100 percent, they’re 50 percent or they’re 10 percent, they’re back to 100 percent.’ So, No. 1, coming from the federal government has to be better predictability, not just with tariffs but with all regulation and all tax policy.”
The senator recalled a time when he was discussing the government with business partners, and the prevailing attitude was “Just stay out of our way.”
“And I do believe in many cases that’s true, but it’s also a little bit more complicated than that,” he said. “I think that for you to grow in manufacturing or really whatever, there are a couple of bottlenecks that we either help with or hurt with.”
U.S. Rep. Blake Moore listed several recent actions in Congress that kept tax cuts in place, reauthorized funding for programs that help businesses move from innovation to commercialization, or otherwise provide a smooth, dependable path that will benefit small businesses.
“When you invest capital, you have to know that we’re not going to change the rules on you,” Curtis said. “You have to know what your tariffs are, you have to know what your tax policy is, and the single best thing that we can do as your federal government is to give you predictability, and that’s, quite frankly, also where we’re failing the most.”
The half-day event featured panel discussions and opportunities to learn about federal government agencies and programs and where small businesses might be able to meet their needs. Topics included nuclear energy and other power production, onshoring, capital access, defense, manufacturing, taxes and business commercialization. One emphasis was getting businesses to better understand the complexities of the federal government — with confusion being what Curtis described as a “gray cloud.” Several speakers decried government acronyms but nonetheless used them to describe their agencies and programs.
“I think one of the single best things that we can do, why we’re doing this today and where our efforts need to be in the future, is to really help all of you understand what opportunities are there, because they are vast, right? They are so vast,” Curtis said.
“What we need to do is do a better job at helping all of you understand just how to bridge and have this interaction with the federal government where you understand what’s available and how to access these.”
The senator encouraged the audience to “pound these booths” in the exhibit area to get a better understanding of how government can help them grow their businesses.
“We need to be more for you than just ‘get out of the way.’ … The federal government will spend trillions of dollars this year. We want to make sure that gets into small businesses’ hands and spurs the economy and you have access to that,” Curtis said.
For example, Josh Carter, associate administrator of the Office of Investment and Innovation at the U.S. Small Business Administration, said one current push is to help lower-level suppliers in defense work dominated by prime contractors. “It’s absolutely overwhelming,” he said of the scope of that work, noting that the F-35 fighter plane program alone has 40,000 suppliers.
Curtis said businesses have an opportunity to interface with the federal government in “a very unique window that I don’t think has existed for decades and decades.”
“I just want to point out that this is a very unique time,” he said. “I think in the defense industry, in the past, you may have been able to, rightly so, accuse the federal government of favoring just a few large contractors. A number of things have changed: We have a disruptor in the White House, we have a disruptor leading the Department of War, we have these conflicts overseas, we’re changing the way that we’re fighting wars.
“This is a really unique opportunity to bust up something that has been very, very ‘tick tock, this game is locked.’ So I am just really excited about the opportunities out there ….”
A former businessman in a family of businesspeople, Curtis told the audience that his colleagues in Washington, D.C., would be “more careful” with taxes and regulations “if they understood just how hard you work to even just keep the lights on.” While it is nice to have large businesses in Utah, government activities — such as law enforcement, schools and paved streets — are possible because small businesses “keep the wheels on the bus of the government,” he said.
“And all of this is happening, as you know, in a context where things are very uncertain overseas and here in the United States,” Curtis said, “and I suspect it’s never been more difficult to be a small business than it is right now.”