President Bush has turned to big business to pick the next head of the embattled federal Small Business Administration.

Steven C. Preston, executive vice president of Strategic Services at The ServiceMaster Company, was tapped for the job only hours after SBA director Hector V. Barreto announced his resignation yesterday to take a job with a Hispanic lobbying group in Washington, D.C. Congress must approve Preston's nomination.

Preston's background is exclusively big business. He previously held a high-ranking executive position as treasurer of First Data Corp. and worked in investment banking at Lehman Brothers, a white-shoe Wall Street firm in New York.

House Small Business Committee Chairman Donald Manzullo, R-Ill., praised Barreto yesterday for streamlining the agency and "learning to do more with less while facing unparalleled challenges to the SBA's disaster loan program."

But one of the agency's harshest critics, Lloyd Chapman, founder and president of the American Small Business League, saw Barreto's tenure in a different light. "I believe that when Barreto was given his job as administrator, he was told to wind down the agency, and that's exactly what he has done," Chapman said in a statement.