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You may not consider the U.S. Small BusinessAdministration's Office of Advocacy a hotbed of controversy,but below the surface runs a stream of wildly disparate accounts ofthe office's validity.
Established in the mid-1970s to give small businessrepresentation, research and policy analysis, the Office ofAdvocacy in its heyday had a staff of 75 and a research budget of$5 million. Today, staff has been reduced to 48 and the researchbudget zeroed out, with a stipulation allowing the SBAAdministrator to redirect monies of up to $700,000 tosmall-business research.