During Minority Enterprise Development Week, we honor the innovators and job creators who run our minority-owned businesses and recommit to providing them with the resources they need to thrive and continue being engines of our economy.
Minority enterprises provide critical goods and services; generate nearly $2 trillion in revenue each year; and serve as reminders of realized American dreams and fulfilled hopes of economic mobility, community uplift, and generational wealth. But even as minority entrepreneurs make critical contributions to our country, they still face barriers that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Capital is frequently inaccessible to minority-owned businesses. Firms owned by minorities are more likely to experience financial stress than those owned by non-minorities. For too long, minority-owned companies had less access to Government contracts, keeping them from accessing some of the more than $650 billion spent by the Federal Government on purchasing goods and services. These conditions have made it so people who have the skills, the drive, and the determination to succeed are often unable to win in our economy.
My Administration is working to open the doors of opportunity to include those who have been left behind for too long. On my first day as President, I issued an Executive Order directing the Federal Government to use all the tools at its disposal to advance racial equity and support underserved communities, and we have taken steps to promote opportunities specifically for small disadvantaged businesses ever since. For example, in my Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Justice and Support for Underserved Communities, I directed agencies to make efforts to increase the share of Federal contracts going to these companies to 15 percent by 2025. Within a year, we increased the amount these companies earned from Federal contracts by $7.5 billion — totaling…
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