John, I am a Disabled Amercian Veteran Business Owner, certified by the VA, not the SBA (the SBA is self-certifed which makes it laughable and wrought with fraud). It takes months of investigaton to become certified by the VA, but the salvation is it is free, except for the time invested by the owner personally. I can honestly say it is very nearly worthless. I have seen minority owned have significant benefit locally. The Federal Government has a GOAL of awarding 3 percent of government contracts to Veterans. As with all government bodies, there are some within the system that try to meet the goal, but nearly across the board, purchasing agents have relationships with longtime vendors and those are very tough to break. And don't mislead yourself; even though you may be qualified to otherwise bid, you still have to be competitive in price. There are no built-in breaks.
The minority program for race and sex are clearly more advantageous, from my perspective. When a bid is advertised as such, I have seen rooms of bidders that are clearly not as experienced or qualified as we are, (some ask questions at prebids that leave me shaking my head) but the bids are specifically written to reward that classification. On a local and sometimes even at the state leve, minority owned businesses do have good success. That is the entire point of the program and it often works. At the federal level (small f ) it is a joke.
GC's advertise and seek you out on very rare occassions, but only so they can check a box on their bid form and say they offered participation, but could not find qualified vendors. They don't really have any honest intention to accept your bid. I know of one bid in California that has been open for over 2 years. It is written specifically for Disabled Veteran Owned business classification. 2 years? You have not found anyone for 2 years? You are not looking very hard.
To be equally as fair, I was offered the opportunity to bid (by several GC's) a local federal project recently (approximately 2 months). After I read the specs (which included servers running Microsoft Server 2003), I passed. I don't know which manufacturer wrote them, but the specs were a hack job. So overall, does it work, yes. If you are a minority it is worth it. If you are a veteran, no. In my case I was a contractor for 25 years before becoming certified. It was a waste of time. Is there fraud in the program, absolutely and it is rampant. The SBA certification process (again, self-certified) invites fraud. It should be eliminated.