Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is moving to dismantle what he calls a vast, entrenched system of race-based contracting and DEI-driven favoritism inside the Pentagons procurement pipeline, targeting a little-known federal program that has quietly steered billions in defense dollars for decades.
According to WND, Hegseth announced that the Department of War is launching a sweeping review and rollback of the Small Business Administrations 8(a) program, a long-standing initiative ostensibly designed to help small disadvantaged businesses.
He argued that the program has strayed far from its original mission and now functions as a conduit for corruptive, unconstitutional, non-merit based DEI programs that divert taxpayer money away from warfighting capability. The move, he said, is part of fulfilling the promises he made when President Donald Trump tapped him to lead the Pentagon and restore a singular focus on military lethality.
When President Trump appointed me as your Secretary of War, I made you a series of promises. I promised that every single one of your taxpayer dollars would go toward one thing, and one thing only. Building the most lethal fighting force on the planet, Hegseth said. And I promised we would gut the corruptive, unconstitutional, non-merit based DEI programs that have weakened our military and distracted us from our primary mission. From his perspective, the 8(a) program has become the archetype of that problem, a legacy DEI mechanism that has survived for years with little public scrutiny.
Hegseth described the 8(a) initiative as both obscure and deeply embedded, calling it the oldest DEI program in the federal government. Were 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 hadnt heard of. Its called the 8A program 8A refers to the Small Business Administrations program to assist, quote, small disadvantaged businesses owned by a socially disadvantaged individual or tribe, end quote. Providing these small businesses with opportunities is a laudable goal, but, over the decades, as it happens, the 8A program has morphed into swamp code words for DEI race-based contracting. Hegseth said. He added that the program has been exploited by intermediaries who profit from preferences while outsourcing the real work to large, well-connected firms.
In many, many instances, these socially disadvantaged businesses, they dont even do work. They take a 10%, 20%, sometimes 50% fee off the top and then pass the contract off to a giant consulting firm, commonly known as Beltway Bandits. In Hegseths telling, this arrangement not only wastes money but entrenches a class of politically favored contractors who thrive on government largesse rather than competition and merit. For conservatives who have long warned about the rise of a permanent swamp economy around Washington, his critique echoes broader concerns about cronyism and identity-based preferences.
Hegseth said the Pentagon has been a particularly ripe target for such practices, with massive contracts awarded under the 8(a) banner with minimal oversight. In the Pentagon, $100 million sole source contracts go out the door to these 8A firms almost every day, without any competition or opportunity for anyone else to bid, Hegseth said.So, effective immediately, Im ordering a line-by-line review of every small business sole source 8A contract that is over $20 million, and well look at everything smaller than that, too. The review, he emphasized, is intended to restore competitive bidding and ensure that defense dollars are tied directly to combat effectiveness rather than ideological agendas.
He outlined a blunt standard for evaluating each contract: whether it contributes to battlefield dominance. First, if a contract doesnt make us more lethal, its gone. We have no room in our budget for wasteful DEI contracts that dont help us win wars, period. Full stop, Hegseth said. Well make sure that every small business getting a contract is the one actually doing the work, and not just some shell company funneling your money to a giant consulting firm. That approach aligns with a broader conservative push to re-center federal policy on merit, performance, and constitutional limits rather than group-based preferences.
The Pentagons 8(a) crackdown comes against the backdrop of President Trumps broader effort to dismantle DEI frameworks across the federal government. On his first day of taking office, President Donald Trump signed an directing federal agencies to dismantle DEI initiatives he described as extreme and costly, along with race-based decision-making. He followed it with another aimed at ending what the administration calls unlawful discrimination tied to those policies and reestablishing merit-driven standards nationwide. Those orders have set the tone for a systematic rollback of the diversity bureaucracy that expanded under prior leadership.
The Department of War has reviewed and diversity-related initiatives throughout 2025 in response to Trumps executive actions. Hegseth in an April 18 social media post that DEI no longer operates within the Pentagon. While some on the left have decried these moves as regressive, supporters argue that they restore equal treatment under the law and refocus the military on its core mission: deterring enemies and winning wars.
The Trump administration spent 2025 diversity initiatives that expanded across government and corporate America under the previous administration. A series of executive actions from President Donald Trump has pressured , , and companies to retreat from those policies, with analysts telling the Daily Caller News Foundation that many businesses now see DEI as a liability rather than an asset.
As the 8(a) program faces unprecedented scrutiny, Hegseths effort signals that, at least within the Pentagon, ideological experiments and race-based contracting will increasingly be judged against a single metric: whether they help or hinder Americas ability to fight and win.
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