An Open Letter to Sec. Hegseth
because his mission must succeed
“We’re actually taking a sledgehammer to the oldest DEI program in the federal government — a program few people outside of Washington have ever heard of, that I hadn’t heard of. It’s called the 8(a) program.”
— Secretary Pete Hegseth, United States Department of War
Dear Secretary Hegseth:
You have been clear that your priorities are lethality, speed, and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars in a threat environment that no longer tolerates waste or complacency.
Those are laudable priorities in a dangerous world, and they deserve serious analysis. As a fellow patriot, I support those goals and thank you for taking them seriously.
I learned early in my career that the difference between a manager and a leader is that a leader will always readily admit what he doesn’t know. I take you at your word, sir. Both in your candid admission that the 8(a) program is new and unfamiliar to you, and in your stated goals.
Out of concern that we might be taking a sledgehammer to load-bearing walls, what follows is written not to defend a label, but to explain what the 8(a) program actually does in practice — and why it is crucial to the mission you are entrusted to advance.
The problems you and President Trump have both identified with our largest defense contractors are very real. Just last week, President Trump criticized Raytheon for being slow to respond to Department of War needs, slow to expand production, and more focused on shareholder payouts than on industrial capacity.
That critique goes to the heart of mission effectiveness.
A supplier base that faces little real pressure to perform will not move faster simply because it is told to do so.
Programs like 8(a), when used correctly, are not indulgences or ideological projects. They are one of the few practical tools the Department has to inject competitive pressure into a contracting environment otherwise dominated by a small number of massive incumbents.
Eliminating or gutting that tool does not discipline the primes.
Rather, it removes one of the precious few levers the Department has to demand better pricing, faster delivery, and greater responsiveness. It is an unearned gift for the primes.
Fraud, Abuse, and the Difference Between a Headline and an Investigation
Mr. Secretary, you cited the important mission of finding and eliminating fraud, and announced a broader interagency investigation effort.
All allegations of fraud deserve careful attention. But allegations, video clips, and properly adjudicated matters are not the same kind of evidence, and treating them as equivalent creates a serious risk of punishing lawful participation while missing the real criminal behavior.
The DOJ Case
DOJ did, in fact, describe a serious criminal scheme involving a former USAID contracting officer, Roderick Watson, and executives associated with Apprio and Vistant, in which bribes were allegedly exchanged for favorable treatment in contracting.
If those allegations are proven, the individuals involved should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Bribery and procurement corruption are poison. But it is important to be precise about what the “$550 million” figure actually refers to. DOJ’s number is the value of all federal contracts implicated in the scheme — not the value of 8(a) contracts, and certainly not evidence that 8(a) itself is a “vehicle for institutionalized abuse.”
The amount of confirmed USAID 8(a) sole-source contract dollars directly tied to Apprio appears to be about $22,000, a single small website contract — hardly the portrait of an 8(a) gravy pipeline. This is exactly the kind of case where a criminal conspiracy should be punished severely while the rhetoric around it should remain proportionate to the actual program-specific facts.
Additionally, I would respectfully suggest asking your staff to compile a simple comparison: the total amount paid in fraud and other procurement-related fines by the major prime contractors — Raytheon, Boeing, and their peers — versus the total paid by firms participating in the 8(a) program. When I attempted to visualize this myself, the disparity was so large that a single chart became unusable: the bar representing the primes overwhelmed the scale, while the 8(a) bar was effectively invisible. The numbers speak for themselves.
You may find that you are investigating shoplifting reports in a neighborhood convenience store while the organized crime syndicates down the street operate casinos in plain sight. One approach generates headlines and activity; the other is where real money, real leverage, and real deterrence actually live.
Broader Investigation
It is public that SBA has contracted with Palantir in a fraud-prevention pilot context, and Treasury has announced wide-ranging reviews of 8(a) contracts.
I am confident that a man committed to personal freedom and constitutional limits does not intend to create an Orwellian enforcement precedent. The prospect of the next Democratic administration using this tool — putting it in the hands of, say, the IRS — should have every conservative’s blood temperature dropping precipitously.
Because the risk is real: systems designed to surface “signals” can quietly become engines of suspicion, where pattern-matching replaces evidence and administrative pressure replaces due process.
Used carefully, analytics can generate leads. Used carelessly, it can invert the burden of proof and punish people for statistical resemblance rather than demonstrated wrongdoing.
If the goal is to eliminate fraud while strengthening legitimacy, the principle must be simple: data can inform investigations, but it cannot substitute for evidence, adjudication, and the presumption of innocence.
If your aim is to root out corruption without sacrificing mission effectiveness or constitutional trust — and I have every confidence in you that it is — then the right approach is the same in all cases: prosecute real criminal conduct aggressively, tighten rules that are genuinely too loose, and refuse to treat headlines or sales talk as if they were findings.
I believe that you are committed to these things, Mr. Secretary, and that when you’re made fully aware of these details, you will do the right thing.
Competition in Practical, Pragmatic Terms — Not in Theory
Mr. Secretary, you are absolutely correct that competition is what brings out the best in everyone, and non-competitive situations should be limited.
But the word “competition” has been used as a bait-and-switch in practice. “Competitive” bids are anything but — and what is called “sole sourcing” inside 8(a) is in practice quite competitive, even Darwinian.
When you examine Department of War sole sourcing, you will find that from FY2018 through FY2024, the Department of War obligated approximately $1.06 trillion through sole-source awards to non-8(a) firms, compared with about $19.7 billion to 8(a) firms—meaning that over 98% of sole-source Department of War dollars flowed to non-8(a) contractors during this period.1
Who got that $1.06 trillion in non-8(a) sole source taxpayer money?
Mostly the largest primes — Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and a small handful of other incumbents — that face far less scrutiny on their own sole-source awards than 8(a) firms do.
8(a) sole-source contracts require mandatory price negotiation, formal determinations of fair market value, and SBA acceptance of the requirement.
By contrast, sole-source awards to large primes typically proceed without SBA oversight or the same program-specific, line-by-line negotiation regime. Gutting 8(a) does not discipline the largest contractors; it removes one of the few areas where the Department demands exceptional transparency and leverage.2
8(a) sole-source awards are tightly constrained and have very real consequences for failure, which is why you will never have to ask President Trump to call an 8(a) company on the public carpet.
Because the 8(a) program gives the customer the power to choose which contractor they want (instead of being forced to take the contractor that wins the bid), it also makes firing 8(a) firms exceptionally easy.
If an 8(a) screws up, they simply do not get federal work again.
Unlike contracts let under Full and Open Competitions, 8(a) firms that get fired for failure to perform don't get a chance to re-win the work. They are simply not invited to bid by the customer that was previously unhappy with them. 8(a) is a ruthlessly Darwinian system.
By taking a sledgehammer to 8(a), Raytheon doesn’t clean up its act — they can leverage their incumbency, their proposal-preparation teams, and their longstanding infrastructure to keep winning competitions according to the rules.
The Department of War will have to continue to do business with them.
In federal procurement, “Full and Open Competition” often looks like what people imagine competition looks like: a one-day open tryout. The government posts an RFP, anyone who already has the right past performance, compliance infrastructure, contract vehicles, clearances, and proposal machinery can show up, run the drills, and the team that looks best that day wins.
That sounds merit-based. It sounds clean. It sounds like a free market.
But from FY2018–FY2024, more than one in five (over 22%) of Department of Defense awards labeled “full and open competition” received only a single bid. A competition of one is a competition in name only.3
While some awards do attract multiple bidders, this pattern suggests that the “full and open” designation frequently just names a legal category. It does not describe a market with robust competitive pressure.
To show what this looks like in reality, let’s look at Raytheon and Boeing. From FY2018 through FY2024, Raytheon received roughly $155 billion in federal contract obligations through awards that were not competed, with roughly $142 billion coming from awards explicitly reported as “not competed” — that is, sole-source contracts — underscoring just how much of Raytheon’s federal revenue flows without meaningful competitive pressure.4
Even within the Raytheon awards labeled as competed, competition is thin: nearly half received only one bid, and fewer than one in four attracted four or more bidders.5
Boeing shows the same: from FY2018–FY2024, the majority of its federal contract dollars flowed through awards that were not competed, with not-competed obligations exceeding competed obligations by several-to-one.6
By contrast, the 8(a) sole-source process — the part that sounds non-competitive to outsiders — often looks less like a one-day tryout and more like how good leaders actually build a winning team.
Imagine you’re selecting a roster.
The non-8(a) “Full and Open” model selects for who has the best agent and impresses with the same old well-known tryout drills. The 8(a) sole-source model selects for who performs the best during games.
That is not “no competition.” It is competition of a different kind: sustained evaluation, direct scrutiny, and selection based on real performance rather than a single artificial event.
In 8(a) sole-source negotiations, the government is required by statute and regulation to review cost and profit in detail, with explicit limits on allowable fee. Contracting officers see labor categories, hours, indirect rates, and margin line-by-line, and must document price reasonableness before an award can be made.
Large primes operating under Full and Open Competition face no comparable statutory profit caps; if two bids are received, the price is presumed reasonable by law, even when margins are high and competitive pressure is thin.
And here is the part that matters most for your stated goals. In 8(a) sole-source negotiations, the government doesn’t just accept a sealed bid and hope for the best. It sees the contractor’s approach up close. It pressures assumptions. It checks execution readiness. It negotiates price line-by-line.
When a small firm is weak, this process exposes it quickly.
When a small firm is strong, it becomes part of the team — the team the Department of War needs if it wants leverage over the primes and a vendor base that can surge in a crisis.
So when people hear “sole source” and assume “no competition,” they are making the same category error as someone who thinks a one-day tryout is the only legitimate way to build a winning team.
Sometimes it is.
But sometimes the higher-standard process is the one that looks less like a contest — and more like the hard, careful work of actually choosing well.
Pass-Throughs and Subcontracting
Much of the concern you’ve raised about the 8(a) program appears to center on what is being described as “pass-through” contracting.
In practice, however, several very different ideas are being conflated, and it will help to separate them.
In plain terms, a true pass-through occurs when a prime contractor lacks the capability to perform the work, hires a subcontractor to do nearly all of it, adds a markup, and bills the government for the bundled cost. To put this in everyday language: John’s company is hired to mow a lawn. John doesn’t own a lawn mower. He hires Bob’s Lawn Service to do the work for $100, adds a 25 percent markup, and invoices the customer $125. John didn’t perform the work; he brokered it.
That structure is not permitted under the 8(a) program. It simply does not occur.
If it were to occur, it would represent an egregiously severe violation of program rules, one that would require a contracting officer (who works for the government, not the 8(a)) being complicit in breaking the law.
The 8(a) program imposes explicit limitations on subcontracting. With limited, contract-type-specific exceptions, 8(a) firms are required to self-perform a substantial portion of the work, and when subcontracting approaches allowable limits, contracting officers are expected to scrutinize and adjust profit accordingly. These are enforceable conditions of participation, not aspirational goals.
If policymakers believe those rules should be stricter, that is a legitimate policy debate. We can change the rules, and we probably should.
But when firms follow the rules as written, they are doing exactly what the program requires them to do. And that is not fraud.
This is not unique to 8(a). President Trump once famously said that paying only $750 in taxes “makes me smart.” The point wasn’t that the rules were perfect; it was that operating within the rules is not the same thing as abusing them. The same principle applies here. If subcontracting levels comply with program requirements, that is compliance — not corruption.
In Full and Open Competition, large prime contractors are generally not subject to comparable self-performance limits. They may lawfully structure work with extensive, multi-tier subcontracting arrangements.
If the objection is really to subcontract-heavy execution models, that concern applies far more directly to the top of the market than to a tightly regulated small-business development program.
Finally, if widespread pass-through abuse were actually occurring within 8(a), it would be almost impossible to hide. Sole-source 8(a) awards are negotiated line-by-line, with full visibility into subcontracting costs and proposed profit. Oversight continues after award through mandatory self-performance reporting to SBA. The design of the program makes brokerage behavior easier to detect and correct in 8(a) than in most other acquisition pathways.
Raytheon and other large primes don’t want you to know this, Mr. Secretary, because they like being able to charge whatever they want and have it presumed reasonable by default — even when they’re the sole bidder.
They especially like being able to charge you for the competitive process that so often results in no real competition anyway.
“Full and Open Competition,” because of the name and the unearned legitimacy the name affords, is often treated as if it were a free good — as if the procurement mechanism of competition is simply a moral preference that costs nothing.
But the decision to go the “Full and Open Competition” route is neither free nor inexpensive. Running a full competition requires industry to build extensive proposal packages, and it requires the government to staff, evaluate, document, and defend the award — including against bid protests, which require work stoppages and expensive delays.
Those costs are real. In practice, proposal effort for complex competitions is commonly estimated as a nontrivial percentage of contract value (on the order of 1–3% for traditional, complex bids), which means that even before performance begins, large procurements can burn hundreds of thousands — or millions — of dollars in combined proposal effort across all bidders.
And the costs are not absorbed out of civic virtue; they are priced back into the system.
And that would be a tolerable price if it reliably bought robust competitive pressure. But as the USASpending data shows, a large share of “competitive” awards attract only one or two bids — competition in name, without the market discipline people imagine.
The point is not that competition itself is bad — real competition is great! The point is that the government pays a real price for formal competition the way it’s conducted under the rules — and when the outcome is frequently one or two bids anyway, that price is often buying theater rather than genuine competitive pressure.
In short, there are two separate questions here: whether the subcontracting rules are designed the way policymakers want them to be, and whether firms are following those rules. The evidence supports the conclusion that, where firms comply, the 8(a) program is operating as intended — and that claims of systemic pass-through abuse confuse dissatisfaction with policy design for proof of misconduct.
Lethality, Speed, Stewardship
You have been clear that your priorities are lethality, speed, and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars. Measured against those standards — not against slogans — the 8(a) program is not a distraction from the mission. It is one of the quiet mechanisms by which the Department sustains it.
From FY2018 through FY2024, veteran-owned and service-disabled veteran-owned firms received approximately $116.7 billion in Department of Defense contract obligations. Of that total, roughly $19.2 billion—about 16.5 percent—flowed through firms that were also participating in the 8(a) program. In some years, the share was much higher: in FY2018, more than 27 percent of veteran-owned DoD dollars flowed through 8(a) firms.7
Those figures are not evidence of favoritism. They are evidence of survival. Many veteran-owned firms — particularly service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses — do not emerge fully formed into the broader defense marketplace.
They develop there.
The 8(a) program is often the bridge that allows veterans who have already served the country in uniform to continue serving it as entrepreneurs: learning the acquisition system, building compliant internal infrastructure, proving performance under scrutiny, and, after graduation, competing outside the program altogether.
Taking a sledgehammer to that bridge does not punish fraudsters. It collapses a development pathway that thousands of veteran-owned firms rely on to reach scale — and that the Department of War relies on to maintain bench strength beyond a handful of entrenched incumbents.
This is not an abstract claim. It is reflected in the views of the Department’s own leadership. When asked about the 8(a) program, nominee after nominee — across the services and across functional portfolios — has described it not as an ideological indulgence, but as a mission tool.
The Secretary of the Navy committed to leveraging 8(a) “in alignment with mission requirements,” emphasizing market research to identify emerging firms that can meet evolving Navy and Marine Corps needs while strengthening the defense industrial base. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment noted that 8(a) firms have brought “speed and innovation into the industrial base,” and agreed that where they deliver accelerated capability to the warfighter, the program is a valuable tool. The Secretary of the Air Force described 8(a) and other small business programs as “valuable tools for strengthening the defense industrial base,” committing to preserve and improve them when they serve the Department’s interests.
Even leaders who began unfamiliar with the program reached the same conclusion once its mechanics were explained. As the Under Secretary for Policy observed, in a threat environment where “the old ways of doing things simply won’t cut it,” alternative pathways that deliver capability quickly are exactly what credible deterrence requires.
That consensus matters. It reflects lived operational experience across the Department, not talking points.
Speed is not achieved by narrowing the supplier base to a few large firms that already dominate the market. Lethality is not strengthened by eliminating the very programs that cultivate new, disciplined entrants — many of them veterans — into that base.
And stewardship is not served by confusing program abuse with program design and destroying a tool that, when enforced properly, delivers capability faster and at scale.
You have said you intend to take a sledgehammer to waste, fraud, and abuse. That is a worthy aim. But a sledgehammer swung without precision does not distinguish between rot and load-bearing structure.
The 8(a) program — especially as it functions for veteran-owned and service-disabled veteran-owned firms — is not decorative scaffolding. It is part of the framework that allows the Department to move quickly, adapt under pressure, and draw strength from Americans who have already proven their willingness to serve.
I do not believe you intend to take a sledgehammer to that.
Merit, American Workers, and What the 8(a) Program Actually Is
Mr. Secretary, I understand why you recently heard about “8(a)” and assumed it means something like: I belong to a favored identity group, therefore I am entitled to taxpayer money. That perception is common — and if it were accurate, I’d be the 8(a) program’s most vocal critic.
The 8(a) program is not, and has never been, an entitlement. It is a tightly regulated business-development program with a high compliance burden, codified eligibility criteria, and real consequences for failure. The kind of ideal government offering conservatives favor — equality of opportunity, not outcome.
Firms do not receive contracts automatically; they are selected by government customers, scrutinized line by line on price and performance, and removed from consideration if they do not perform.
More importantly, the eligibility rules themselves bear little resemblance to what most people imagine when they hear “DEI.”
Under current law and regulation, eligibility for 8(a) is based on two distinct concepts: social disadvantage and economic disadvantage, both of which must be demonstrated and documented. “Social disadvantage” is defined broadly in regulation as having experienced bias or obstacles in American society that impaired advancement. While there was once a rebuttable presumption tied to certain racial or ethnic groups, that presumption is dead — as it should be. Today applicants are required to provide individualized narratives and evidence. In practice, applications are reviewed on specific facts, not slogans.
Economic disadvantage is even more concrete. To qualify, an individual’s personal net worth must be under $850,000, total assets under $6.5 million, and income must fall below prescribed limits — thresholds that encompass the overwhelming majority of Americans (about 93% and 97% respectively, based on the most recent Survey of Consumer Finance put out by the Fed.)
This is not a program for people of a certain skin tone or sex. It is a program for small business owners who are trying to build capacity in one of the most, possibly the most, demanding procurement environments in the world.
Participation is also temporary. The 8(a) program has a strict nine-year limit, after which firms graduate and must compete without program support. Many companies that entered years ago — under earlier policy regimes — have already exited the program entirely.
Whatever one thinks of past policy choices, the idea that 8(a) is a permanent carve-out or a lifetime entitlement is simply false.
It is also important to distinguish rules from enforcement. If prior administrations were lax in screening applicants or aggressive in stretching eligibility — if President Biden treated the program the way he did the Southern border, in other words, which wouldn’t surprise me at all — that is a failure of administration, not a defect in the underlying statutory design. The appropriate response is tighter enforcement and clearer guardrails, not the destruction of a tool that, when used correctly, advances merit, performance, and accountability.
If the goal is to purge any remaining ideological residue from the program, I would strongly support that effort. But doing so requires understanding what the program actually is today — not what its critics assume it must be.
I will add only one personal note, because it bears directly on the question of merit: until you have lived as a deaf woman pursuing a mathematics degree, it is hard to appreciate the confidence costs and doubt burdens that poorly designed DEI efforts can impose on people who want to be judged strictly on performance.
The 8(a) program, properly enforced, does not lower standards; it raises them — and then removes the training wheels.
In that sense, 8(a) is not an alternative to merit. It is one of the ways the Department ensures that merit, discipline, and accountability extend beyond a narrow circle of entrenched incumbents and into the broader American workforce you have said you want to put first.
Mr. Secretary, I am realistic about the odds that you will ever read this letter. They are small. But faith in small probabilities is something I have lived with all my life.
I am a deaf, bookish girl who wanted to learn mathematics — a subject traditionally taught with the professor’s back to the room, chalk on the board, sound assumed. I wanted not only to learn it, but to work with it. And I have. I now do work I love, governed by equality under the law that most women in human history could only have imagined.
I sleep peacefully at night not because the world is safe, but because I know it is guarded — by patriotic men and women, and by the institutions under your direction, standing watch against threats that are very real. Those are not abstractions. They are small miracles layered atop one another: law, order, competence, and restraint.
It is in that spirit that I write to you. Not because I expect certainty, but because I believe in careful judgment. Sledgehammers have their place. But so do instruments that require calibration, precision, and an understanding of what they are meant to strengthen rather than shatter.
I hope you will see this letter.
If you do, I have complete confidence that your demonstrated patriotism, pragmatism, and commitment to common sense will guide you toward reform that preserves what works, corrects what does not, and ultimately strengthens the Department of War’s ability to move faster, spend more wisely, and prevail when it matters.
Thank you for your service, Mr. Secretary.
Data are from USASpending.gov contract award records for FY2018–FY2024. Sole-source awards are defined as actions with extent_competed = "NOT COMPETED" and restricted to Department of Defense (now Department of War) agencies based on awarding or parent-award agency name. Records are deduplicated to the award level using award_id_piid, with obligations summed across all transactions associated with each award. Awards are classified as 8(a) if c8a_program_participant = 't'; all others are treated as non-8(a). Period totals reflect the sum of year-by-year results.
Sole-source awards under the SBA’s 8(a) program are subject to additional, program-specific scrutiny. FAR 19.808-1 requires direct price negotiation with the 8(a) firm and a formal determination that the price is fair and reasonable, and it requires SBA acceptance of the requirement into the program. Sole-source awards to large contractors typically proceed under FAR 6.302-1, which relies on a justification and approval but does not involve SBA oversight or the same program-specific negotiation regime. On cost-type contracts, statutory limits on fee also apply (see 10 U.S.C. § 3322; 41 U.S.C. § 3905).
Data are from USASpending.gov contract award records (FY2018–FY2024). Awards are limited to Department of Defense actions reported as Full and Open Competition or Full and Open Competition After Exclusion of Sources. Records are deduplicated to the award level using award_id_piid, with obligations summed across transactions and bid counts taken as the maximum reported value per award. Delivery orders (award type C) are excluded because competition occurs at the underlying IDIQ level and bid counts are reported at the IDIQ level. Awards without reported bid counts after these filters are categorized as “missing” and left out of the percentage calculations.
Data are from USASpending.gov contract award records for FY2018–FY2024. For each fiscal year, records were restricted to Raytheon Technologies (RTX) and legacy subsidiaries using recipient and parent name matching. Obligations were rolled up to the award level by summing all transactions associated with each award, then grouped by the government-reported “extent competed” category. Period totals reflect the sum of the year-by-year results. Dollar amounts represent total obligated amounts.
Percentages are calculated for FY2018–FY2024 Raytheon/RTX awards that are labeled as competed and that report a numeric value for “number of offers received.” Records are deduplicated to the award level using award_id_piid; multiple transactions or modifications associated with the same award are counted once. Where multiple bid counts appear for a single award, the maximum reported value is used. Awards without reported bid counts are excluded from this calculation, and no awards are double-counted within a fiscal year.
Data are from USASpending.gov contract award records for FY2018–FY2024. Awards are restricted to Boeing and Boeing-controlled operating subsidiaries based on recipient and parent names, excluding distribution businesses and joint ventures for consistency with the Raytheon analysis. Records are deduplicated to the award level using award_id_piid, with obligations summed across all associated transactions. Awards are grouped by the government-reported “extent competed” category, and period totals reflect the sum of year-by-year results.
Data are from USASpending.gov contract award records for FY2018–FY2024. Awards are limited to Department of Defense actions identified by an exact match on the awarding agency name (“Department of Defense”). Records are deduplicated to the award level using award_id_piid, with obligations summed across all transactions associated with each award. Veteran-owned firms are identified using the government-reported indicators for veteran-owned and service-disabled veteran-owned businesses. An award is classified as veteran-owned if either indicator is reported as true on any associated transaction. Awards are classified as 8(a) if the c8a_program_participant flag is reported as true on any transaction associated with the award during the fiscal year. Dollar totals reflect net obligations, inclusive of deobligations. Percentages are calculated as the share of veteran-owned award dollars or award counts attributable to firms that were also participating in the 8(a) program. FY2018–FY2024 totals reflect the sum of year-by-year results.