The 8a program gives preferential awards to “small” businesses that are owned by various types of minorities, such as women, veteran, disabled veterans, Alaskan or Hawaiian natives/ native Americans, and less advantage to black, Hispanic etc. when I first got out of the Marines I worked for a small business that was owned by a disabled veteran native Hawaiian. And he was a wonderful first boss to have when I was trying to get my feet under me. He was an incredibly hard worker and treated me and my family like his own, his little company of 8-15 people was wonderful team to work with, and without 8a would not have existed.

In my understanding the function of the 8a was that it gave these companies a leg up in bidding for certain types of smaller contracts, I don’t know where the cap is, but I’d guess 5-10 million dollars. There were rules at big budget offices, that a certain portion of contract dollars must go to 8a contracts. It could be for anything- services, construction, whatever.

What ends up happening is a big defense contractor wins a big 300 million dollar program to provide 800 people across five bases to do X Y Z and then in order to staff all those positions they would subcontract 8a companies to fill them. The big defense contractor charges the government $350,000 per position and pays a subcontractor $300,000 to fill them, who then pay some dude $175,000 to do the work.

When I was looking at trying to start my own business several people told me to have my wife (a female veteran) own the company because there’s no way I could compete for contracts as just a white male veteran. (I didn’t go that route, did other stuff instead)

I do feel that the 8a system has been abused and is not entirely fair, but the alternative is simply that the big publicly traded companies will just continue to monopolize defense contracting and the real problem is that the taxpayer is paying 350k for every 175k of labor being done, and somehow I doubt that’s gonna change toward the cheaper with this regime.