The Pentagon’s welfare racket needs to end

The useful part

With tensions in Iran still boiling and our national debt hitting $40 trillion, it's time to take a hard look at the military's budget. We should preserve what the military needs to be capable and prepared — and cut the waste. The good news is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has already announced a review.

How it works

• The disadvantaged firm did little more than sign the paperwork and collect a fee.
• It followed the standard business model of the Small Business Administration's 8(a) Business Development Program, the federal government's oldest identity-based contracting scheme — and one of Washington's...
• This program is so fundamentally defective that it should be abolished outright.
• In the summer of 2024, a "socially disadvantaged" small business won two Defense Logistics Agency contracts worth more than $34 million.
• The firm then handed 95% of one contract's value to Lockheed Martin and 94% of the other to a subsidiary of Leonardo DRS, two of the world's largest defense contractors.

What to take from it

In January, Secretary Hegseth announced that the Pentagon would take a "sledgehammer" to the program and ordered a line-by-line review of every small business sole-source and set-aside award above $20 million.