AAU sent a letter to Senate Small Business Committee Chair Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ranking Member to oppose provisions in the “SBA Reauthorization and Improvement Act of 2019.” The letter notes that while the legislation increases the annual percentage for the Small Business Innovation and Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs, it does so at the expense of federal research investments that “empower the discoveries that lead to new technologies and processes that foster new small businesses.” It is important to support programs like SBIR and STTR, which are important to our nation’s innovation pipeline advancing biomedical and physical sciences and engineering, but "now is not the time for the United States to shift much-needed funds from these foundational research programs to the SBIR and STTR programs.”