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How A Top Pentagon Contractor Enriches DC Insiders Using Law Intended To Help Eskimos
The Department of War has awarded $45 billion in contracts to “Alaskan Native” companies in the last half-decade, fueled by minority-contracting laws. But Alaska Natives are hard to come by at the companies. Instead, the work most commonly happened in Virginia, with racial preference laws putting white, Democrat Beltway insiders in multi-million-dollar homes, while natives live in poverty.
No “Alaskan native” company got more contracts than ASRC Federal, which lists zero native executives. The company is named after, and is owned by, the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, a for-profit umbrella company representing 14,000 Inupiaq natives in a remote region of Alaska known as the North Slope. The company is ranked the 111th-largest private company in America, with $5.7 billion in revenue. It owns five million acres of land, including oil reserves whose sale leads to dividend payments to the natives.
Yet the most valuable resource might come from Washington, which in 1971 passed a law saying companies can get contracts without having to go through the competitive bidding process if they are at least 51% owned by Alaskan Natives. Other minorities can get no-bid contracts for nine years while they own a small business, but Alaskan firms retain the disadvantaged status even when they have billions of dollars in revenue.
That has led to business executives donning the skins of native people to get high-tech contracts, under the curious pretext that the natives dwelling in huts are learning to do advanced engineering. The scale of the riches that unleashes is mind-boggling.
Last month alone, ASRC Federal announced that it was awarded a Defense Logistics Agency contract worth up to $2.3 billion, as well as a “Missile Defense Agency Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract with a ceiling of $151 [billion].”
The Department of War has awarded nearly one million separate contracts, totaling $45 billion, to “Alaskan Native” companies since fiscal year 2021, according to USASpending.gov. The most common “place of performance,” however, was Virginia. Less than 12% was spent in Alaska.
No company brought in more than ASRC Federal, which is made up of numerous subsidiary companies that exist to get federal contracts. ASRC Federal Facilities Logistics LLC billed taxpayers $2 billion, ASRC Communications Ltd. charged half a billion, ASRC Federal Field Services LLC earned $390 million, and ASRC Federal System Solutions LLC took $319 million.
ASRC Federal’s CEO is Jennifer Felix, who lives in a $4.3 million, 14,000-square-foot home in Loudoun County, Virginia. The mansion sits on four acres and includes a guest home and private movie theater. Felix has showered liberal politicians with tens of thousands of dollars in donations since 2022, donating to groups like “Pro-Choice Majority 2024,” “Elect Dems Now,” and the campaigns of Virginia senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.
Meanwhile, there is no sign that residents of the North Slope even have a public movie theater. The only theater in town is a now-closed, rusted hut, research from the American Accountability Foundation, a government watchdog group, found.
Home of white “Alaskan Native” contractor CEO, replete with private movie theater
Shuttered theater used by actual Alaskan Natives
“Felix has a long history of working with government contractors, previously being employed with companies like General Dynamics, Sotera Defense Solutions, and Deloitte. She is, put simply, a typical Beltway bandit defense contractor,” the American Accountability Foundation wrote in a report provided to The Daily Wire.
Conservatives say no-bid minority contracting laws, known as 8(a), are wasteful and unfair. But the absence of actual Alaskan Natives at companies bearing their names raises questions about whether the program has even succeeded in its liberal-minded goal of lifting minorities out of poverty by training them in business.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth raised a similar question last month when he said that other minority-owned firms often subcontract the work to white-owned firms, while keeping a large cut for playing middleman. “In the Pentagon, $100 million sole-source contracts go out the door to these 8(a) firms almost every day without any competition or opportunity for anyone else to bid,” he said.
Joseph Winthrop, ASRC Federal’s chief financial officer, lives in a $2 million Loudoun County home replete with a wine cellar. Executive Scott Altman lives in a Georgetown townhouse and is paid $1.1 million a year, according to a recent contract disclosure.
Clifford Greenblatt lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, the historic domain of the Beltway elite, in a neighborhood that is 0% black or native and has a $200,000 median per capita income. Chief Strategy Officer Ann Stevens lives on the banks of the Potomac River in Great Falls, Virginia.
It’s a vastly different life than the company’s Inupiat shareholders. “The supposed beneficiaries of the corporation – the Inupiat – live in conditions that would make most Americans cringe,” the American Accountability Foundation wrote. Alaskan Natives make up nearly all the people on welfare in the North Slope, with more than 17% collecting food stamps.
A spokeswoman for ASRC Federal, Aubrel Mellos, did not respond to questions including how many of the company’s employees are Alaskan Native, or what dividends from federal contract dollars have been paid out to native people. But she wrote in an email:
“Every ASRC subsidiary operates at the direction of ASRC’s 100% Iñupiaq Board of Directors for the benefit of its 14,000+ Iñupiaq shareholders. ASRC’s Board Members are directly selected by its Indigenous shareholders through annual elections. ASRC Federal’s operations, business priorities, and hiring are done to the benefit of ASRC’s Iñupiaq shareholders, who receive dividends based on the success of the corporation – as was the will of Congress and the federal government when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA) established ASRC and the 11 other regional Alaska Native corporations.”
“ASRC Federal directly contributes to the self-determination of the North Slope Iñupiat through dividend payments and economic opportunity, contributing to a remarkable increase in lifespan on Alaska’s North Slope,” she continued.
Joseph Winthrop’s wine cellar
The largest Inupiat city
For decades, politicians in both parties have said that Alaskan contracting was not advancing the goals that justified the program. That’s what then-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said in 2010. In one case from that time period, a Bethesda, Maryland, man was paid $15 million to run an Alaskan government contractor for three years, while its Alaskan Native owners received a total of $682,000 in dividends in 2009, or $305 each. The company won a contract to make military uniforms, which it manufactured in Puerto Rico instead of Alaska.
But efforts at reform have been blocked by Alaska Republican senators such as the now-deceased Ted Stevens, who for years chaired the powerful Appropriations Committee. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is a contender to chair either the Senate Appropriations Committee or its defense subcommittee next Congress.
Now, if the Alaskan program meets its end, it’s likely to be through the abolition of the broader minority-contracting program. The Trump administration has made moves to rein in the DEI scheme after a black man, Walter Barnes, pleaded guilty to getting $500 million in USAID contracts by paying a USAID official $1 million in bribes. The scheme worked because 8(a) empowers a government official to steer contracts to specific companies.
The increased scrutiny has placed Alaska’s senators, both Republicans, in the curious position of defending the DEI program as a whole.
Sen. Joni Ernst, chair of the Small Business Committee, which oversees the 8(a) program, asked agencies to pause sole-source contracts in order to get a handle on fraud. But Murkowski and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) secretly urged the agencies to ignore that request, according to a letter previously obtained by The Daily Wire.
The letter highlighted that Pentagon officials enjoy taking advantage of the Alaskan law because although the competitive bidding process is designed to get the most qualified company and the best price, it is also a bureaucratic slog.
“We consistently hear from top Pentagon officials that the 8(a) Program provides flexibility and timeliness in procuring weapons systems that strengthen our country,” they wrote. “The program reduces administrative burden, shortens acquisition timelines, and avoids the delays and litigation risks that often accompany large-scale procurements.”
Murkowski and Sullivan did not respond when The Daily Wire asked for statistics about how many Alaskan Natives actually work at firms like Bowhead, another multibillion dollar defense contractor whose leadership consists virtually entirely of white males.
In the 1980s, Congress passed laws allowing Native Americans to join Alaskan Natives as so-called “super 8(a)’s,” exempt from having to show that they are actually small, disadvantaged companies. Undercover journalist James O’Keefe caught an executive from one such firm, ATI Government Solutions, boasting that it received a $100 million contract and kept two-thirds while paying a big company, like Accenture, to do the actual work.
None of ATI’s executives was native, either. Members of the Susanville Indian Rancheria tribe, which owns part of ATI Government Solutions, were interviewed by O’Keefe’s outlet. “Here you have this millionaire making money off of us, and we’re here begging for help. All of the things that were created for us, we don’t benefit from,” one tribe member said.
The American Accountability Foundation called for ending the 8(a) program, saying “it is currently not benefiting minority populations and is enriching D.C. elites.”
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