Under Fire The SBA's Office of Advocacy faces the fight of its life.

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.

"The problem is the government knows a lot about virtuallyeverything except small business," says chief counsel of theOffice of Advocacy Jere Glover. "We know more about broccolithan we do about small business."