Six Errors in One Sentence
a data-driven rebuttal to The Daily Wire’s claims about 8(a) contracting
January 20, 2025.
The Trump administration takes office and inherits a disaster.
The border is a mess. Enforcement has collapsed. Smugglers are thriving. Asylum claims are backlogged. Entire stretches of the law haven’t been meaningfully enforced in years.
The pictures are grim. The numbers are worse.
The Border Czar steps to the podium, clears his throat, and announces the plan:
Get rid of the borders.
Borders, he explains, are outdated, unconstitutional, and riddled with abuse. They attract fraud. They create perverse incentives. They reward the wrong people. And because bad actors have learned how to exploit them, the only responsible solution is to abolish borders entirely.
Applause breaks out. “Ban the border!” the people cry.
This, in essence, is the argument now being made about the 8(a) program by the Daily Wire.
To justify this move, their recent article leans on a claim made by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth — and doesn’t bother to verify the accuracy.
According to Hegseth, the Department of War is currently sending “$100 million in sole-source contracts out the door to 8(a) firms almost every day,” without competition. The Daily Wire quotes this claim verbatim and then builds the rest of its argument on top of it.
That number is wrong.
Not slightly inflated.
Not a skosh off.
Wrong.
Using the government’s own publicly available contract data, the actual figure is remarkably stable across three fiscal years (per day):
FY2023: about $1.7M
FY2024: about $1.9M
FY2025: about $2.0M
If we relax the definition of “sole source” to include as many contracts as possible (per day):
FY2023: about $24.7M
FY2024: about $26.7M
FY2025: about $21.8M
That is not a rounding error. Under the most conservative definition of sole source, Hegseth’s number is roughly 5000% more than the real amount. Even under the most generous possible interpretation of “sole source,” Hegseth’s numbers are about 3.7 to 4.6 times higher than the true amount.
Just as important: the numbers are boringly consistent year over year. There is no spike. No surge. No explosion that would justify breathless rhetoric about an out-of-control program suddenly hemorrhaging money.1
Far larger than the imaginary $100 million a day program, consistently across all three years, is DoD (aka Department of War) sole-source contracting overall — which is overwhelmingly non-8(a) contracts. It is to large, incumbent firms.
In FY2023–FY2025, non-8(a) sole-source awards averaged roughly $480–$540 million per day, depending on definition. Hegseth did not discover a scandal in 8(a); he misidentified the denominator and blamed the smallest slice of it.
Under the narrow, textbook definition of sole source, 8(a) accounts for well under 1% of DoD sole-source dollars across FY2023–FY2025; even under the broadest reasonable definition, it remains only about 4–5%.
Now, Hegseth getting this wrong is unfortunate but unsurprising. He is a political appointee, making a rhetorical case for a policy change he already wants.
But that is not an excuse for a journalist.
A reporter’s job is not to repeat dramatic claims from people in power. It is to check them — especially when those claims are being used to justify sweeping conclusions.
Repeating an eye-popping number because it flatters the narrative is not reporting. It’s stenography.
And when that number collapses under even minimal scrutiny, the rest of the argument collapses with it.
Yes, the error really is this basic.
The Daily Wire really is publishing reporting that shows zero evidence of the most basic verification. None.
I suppose this was always a risk — that mainstream media screwed up so badly, for so long, that alternative media would think they could half-ass it — but these particular chickens are now coming home to roost, and it’s ugly.
We’re in trouble, y’all. The Daily Wire, who many of us on the center-right and right count on, is proving itself incapable of doing a basic level of homework — homework so basic that every homeschooling parent I know would fail their own fourth graders for this kind of laziness.
The Daily Wire published an article today that is so riddled with errors and represents such a massive self-own that the Left is surely popping champagne corks.
In today’s article, this single sentence —
“The spectacle demonstrates the absurdity of 8(a) contracting law, which requires that that 5% of all federal government contracts be ‘set aside’ for minority-, women-owned, and other ‘disadvantaged’ businesses.”
— contains no fewer than six discrete factual and legal errors.
These are not matters of interpretation or ideological disagreement.
They are basic category mistakes that would not survive five minutes with the statute, the FAR, or the SBA’s own program descriptions.
That a professional reporter at The Daily Wire published this sentence is, frankly, astonishing.
Error 1: Calling this “8(a) contracting law”
The goals they reference have to do with small business contracts overall. They are not specific to 8(a) contracts. It comes from government-wide small business contracting goals set out in 15 U.S.C. § 644. 8(a) is a sub-category of small disadvantaged businesses and is at the contracting officer’s discretion. It is frequently far more competitive than “Full & Open,” as I’ve written about several times (and as have others).
Error 2: Claiming the law “requires” anything to be set aside
There is no legal requirement that any fixed share of contracts be set aside. The statute establishes aspirational government-wide goals, not mandates or quotas. At this point, I am wondering if the Daily Wire is even aware that the FAR is online. I see no evidence anyone there has read Part 19.
Error 3: Saying “5% of all federal government contracts”
The goals are with respect to dollar value, not number of contracts. Confusing these two metrics is not a rounding error; it fundamentally misstates how federal procurement is tracked and evaluated. And this isn’t hard; the statutes are literally online, written in English.
Those of you who haven’t yet accepted that the Daily Wire is just as untrustworthy as the mainstream media may want to say I’m nit-picking here, but I’m not. If a journalist can’t be precise and exacting with details, they have no goddamn business reporting on details, much less advocating for sweeping changes based on those details.
Error 4: Conflating goals with set-asides
A goal is a reporting and performance benchmark. The statute does not say “set aside 5%”; it says “establish goals.”
Error 5: Lumping minority-owned, women-owned, and “other disadvantaged” (ex: Service Disabled Veteran Owned) businesses together
These are distinct legal categories with separate statutory goals.
Small Disadvantaged Businesses (SDBs): 5% goal
Women-Owned Small Businesses (WOSBs): 5% goal
8(a) may or may not be included in these 5%; it generally is in the SDB, but not always. Again, these are goals. They are not laws, quotas, or requirements.
Error 6: Treating 8(a) as a racial or gender quota
The 8(a) program is not “minority contracting law,” and it is not a women-owned program. It is a business development program administered by SBA with defined eligibility, term limits, continuing review, and specific contracting authorities (including competitive 8(a) set-asides and limited 8(a) sole-source awards). Large corporations, which are not 8(a) participants, get 96-99% of sole source dollars, a fact that is verifiable by anyone with an internet connection.
Conflating it with a crude “minority/women quota” is not just sloppy — it erases the actual legal structure of the program and replaces it with a cartoon.
Six errors in one sentence.
Any one of these errors would be embarrassing in isolation. Taken together, they reveal a media organization that either failed to verify basic facts or published claims they did not understand well enough to interrogate. I don’t know which it is, and I’m not sure which is worse to contemplate.
God help me, but I cannot think of any third possibility.
Either way, the center-right and right are in trouble. Six errors in one sentence means that we cannot count on the Daily Wire to get anything right.
The reporter is Luke Rosiak — someone whose work I previously trusted and, regrettably, defended. And, sadly, someone who has previously been called to testify before Congress on the topic of the 8(a) program, which should tell you just how far down the “death of expertise” has really taken us.
This is not an ideological disagreement. It is not a close call.
It is a complete failure to distinguish goals from mandates, programs from statutes, dollars from contracts, and mechanisms from outcomes.
If this is the level of rigor being applied to coverage of the 8(a) program, then yes — it is entirely reasonable to ask how much of the Daily Wire’s prior reporting would survive a similarly basic fact check.
Not because they are wrong about values.
But because they are wrong about how the law actually works. Which is actually worse.
Once you step past the headline outrage and read the body of the piece, the article collapses into something even more revealing: the Daily Wire spends roughly a thousand words describing alleged failures of verification, enforcement, and contract administration — and then blames the existence of the program itself.
That is not investigative journalism.
It’s ideological argument masquerading as a scandal. Ideological argument is good, but don’t lie and claim you’re doing journalism!
Here’s the core category error the article never stops making:
If a rule exists and someone violates it, and the agency fails to catch it, that’s an enforcement problem.
It is not proof that the rule is “absurd.”
It is certainly not proof that the entire policy goal should be abolished.
Conservatives understand this distinction everywhere else, as in the border example. Why is President Trump cracking down on violations of immigration law? Because when good laws are ignored, that’s an enforcement problem.
When the executive branch fails to enforce immigration law, we do not say “borders are absurd and should be abolished.” We say: enforce the law. When prosecutors decline to charge crimes, we do not say “criminal law is absurd.” We say: prosecute. When an agency blows an audit, we do not say “accounting is absurd.” We say: fix the controls.
But when the target is 8(a), suddenly a basic conservative principle — don’t confuse non-enforcement with bad law — disappears.
And the irony is that Rosiak’s own reporting hands you the knife.
He repeatedly describes conduct that is already prohibited under existing procurement rules and SBA program requirements: pass-through behavior, misrepresentation, and prime contractors who don’t actually perform the required share of the work.
Those are not “loopholes.” They are violations. If the facts are true — an ‘if’ the size of Texas and one that, given the errors already documented in this article, I am not willing to take at face value — the scandal is that the government failed to catch it.
Not that the government had an 8(a) program.
Even his own quoted factory owner admits the core issue is not “DEI” but verification:
“I started to think there was something fraudulent going on… The military had apparently never verified…”
Exactly. That’s the point. Verification failed.
And then the piece does something that should make any reader — left, right, or libertarian — sit up and frown: it tries to smuggle in the premise that the only reason this happened is because the government was chasing “quotas.”
That word is not neutral. It is doing work.
Because “quota” implies an illegal mandate. It implies compelled outcomes. It primes the reader to see every downstream failure as morally illegitimate — even if the upstream policy is, in reality, a set of statutory goals measured in dollars and pursued through lawful procurement mechanisms.
This matters because it flips causality. It turns “the government failed to enforce its own rules” into “the government was forced by law to do something insane.”
That is not a mistake. It’s how propaganda works.
To be clear, a person can oppose the 8(a) program on principle — or oppose all small-business preferences in federal contracting — and make a coherent, good-faith argument for that position. A legitimate policy debate.
A conservative can argue:
“I oppose any sort of small-business preferences in contracting on principle,” or
“I think these programs should be narrower,” or
“I think enforcement is too weak and incentives are distorted.”
Fine. Make the case.
But Rosiak doesn’t do that. He does something lazier: he takes one allegedly bad contract story, stuffs it into an invented legal framework (“requires 5% be set aside”), and then declares the whole program absurd.
That move is not just intellectually dishonest; it is politically counterproductive. Because it hands the Left a gift:
“Look, conservatives can’t even describe the law they’re attacking. Conservative media cannot get basic facts right, and conservative journalists are either so stupid or so lazy that they don’t understand procurement 101.”
If your stated goal is to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, you should be furious — because this kind of sloppy framing makes serious reform harder.
It turns what could be a clean, bipartisan argument for better controls into culture-war noise that collapses under a single hyperlink to the statute.
Even inside the article’s own facts, there’s a second contradiction he never faces: much of what he describes is not unique to 8(a) at all.
Contractors subcontract, including Raytheon and Boeing.
Every company doesn’t do every part of every job. Specialization and comparative advantage are core aspects of capitalism.
Licensing arrangements exist. Contracting officers sometimes buy through intermediaries rather than directly from large manufacturers. “Middleman” structures happen in federal procurement in every socioeconomic category — and in plenty of full-and-open contracts too — because the government is buying bundles of compliance, distribution, logistics, documentation, and risk transfer, not just a logo and some fabric.
You can criticize that. You can propose reforms. But it isn’t evidence that “8(a) contracting law” is absurd. It’s evidence that procurement is complicated — and that oversight has to be competent.
Which brings us to the most important point for a right-leaning reader who actually cares about institutions:
If the story is true, the fix is not abolition. It’s enforcement.
Enforce existing performance-of-work requirements.
Enforce limits on subcontracting.
Verify ownership and control.
Terminate and debar when appropriate.
Audit, document, and prosecute fraud.
In other words: do the conservative thing.
They’re fighting a straw man they built out of vibes, resentment, and a failure to read. And it's as sad as it is pathetic.
The lack of a rigorous, skeptical press in a free society is profoundly dangerous.
When people with power make sweeping claims, those claims must be checked — not because they’re left-wing or right-wing, but because they are powerful.
When media outlets decide that their job is to amplify rhetoric and pursue an agenda rather than interrogate rhetoric and report facts, letting readers set their own agendas, they stop acting as a corrective and start acting as an accelerant.
That is how bad arguments metastasize into bad policy.
This piece is not a defense of the 8(a) program. It is a defense of something far more basic: the idea that facts matter, that numbers have meaning, and that enforcement failures are not proof that laws themselves are absurd.
If we cannot even agree on that much, then we are not arguing about policy anymore — we are arguing about reality.
And when reality becomes optional, the people who lose are not pundits or politicians. They always somehow manage to get paid.
The people who lose are the ordinary Americans who make the country work.
That is why this matters.
And that is why it is so disappointing.
Methodology, briefly: for each year, I downloaded the full fiscal year’s data, restricted the data to Department of Defense awards, aggregated obligations at the award level to avoid double-counting modifications, and calculated daily averages using calendar days. I ran both a narrow (only “not competed” in the extent_competed column) and a broad (“not competed,” “not competed under SAP,” and “not available for competition”) definition of “sole source” both so critics can pick their preferred standard and to give maximum charity to the opposition. The conclusion does not change.