Few organizations know more about leadership than the United States Army. Yet for years, the Army paid an outside consultant for instruction on the topic: A fly-by-night company co-founded by a Pakistani who sits on the board of an organization once linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Between 2021 and 2025, the Army Corps of Engineers shelled out $1.7 million across eight contracts to the vaguely-named Nonprofit Empowerment Group. The group is actually a for-profit, bare-bones operation configured to scoop up federal contracts using woman-owned “set-asides.” The company’s only listed employee is a former bank teller who hardly seemed to meet the government’s call for an academic institution to provide “graduate level instruction” on “leadership development skills.” Yet the so-called “Nonprofit Empowerment Group” advertised a qualification that helped it gain access to the military: Its status as a “Disadvantaged Women Small Owned Business” [sic]. The saga raises questions about whether the government’s affirmative action contracting law, known as 8(a), not only wastes money by padding the wallets of middlemen, but could potentially undermine readiness and even risk foreign influence. The Army canceled the Nonprofit Endowment Group’s contracts this week, the Daily Wire can exclusively report. Its only known employee, Angela Massey, declined to discuss the company’s work with The Daily Wire. According to Illinois corporation filings, Massey is the company’s president, while its secretary is Tariq H. Cheema. At the same address in Lombard, Illinois, the pair once operated a nonprofit called the World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists. It was a reverse configuration — with Massey as secretary and Cheema as president, according to tax-exempt filings. The Nonprofit Empowerment Group cites seven clients on its website, many of which appear to move money from Islamic nonprofits with ties to Cheema to the for-profit he co-founded. That includes The Global Donors Forum, another group founded by Cheema; The American Refugee Committee, for which Cheema serves as executive director; The Association of Pakistani Physicians of North America, where Cheema also held the position of executive director; Roshni Homes, where Cheema served as an advisor; and The Islamic Medical Association of North America (IMANA), on whose board Cheema sits. The Muslim Brotherhood, a designated terror organization, in 1991 included the Islamic Medical Association on “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” That document, laying out a plan for the radical Muslim group to take over North America, described how to bring about a “grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” The Islamic Medical Association was established as a “constituent organization” of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated out of Illinois. The United States named ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial centered on Hamas fundraising. The World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists was established in 2009 to “build a culture of enduring engagement where Muslim donors collaborate with each other.” But it almost immediately went hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, according to a nonprofit tax filing signed by Massey, who has not been listed on the forms in recent years. Those filings said it hadn’t taken foreign donations, but Cheema, who declined to answer The Daily Wire’s questions, has said the group was operating abroad. In 2013, he said, “Our headquarters are in Chicago but we are just establishing a second headquarters in Doha, so much more of our work will in the future be handled from Qatar. I split my time between the two, and also my home country, Pakistan.” “I went to medical school and led an essentially normal life until September 11, 2001. That was a wake up call for everybody. I was moved by the events and the reactions to them, but especially by a growing awareness that Muslim charities were being shut down more on the basis of suspicion than evidence of wrong doing,” he said. “We also were aware of the enforcement of new regulations that were making giving more difficult.” While Cheema describes himself as “among the top 500 most influential Muslims shaping our world today,” the finances that the World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists reported to the United States government were in disarray. By 2016, the last year it filed a nonprofit disclosure, it had income of only $6,955 and $392,809 in debt. But Cheema and Massey still had the Nonprofit Empowerment Group, which seemed to have been operating as a for-profit slush fund focused on Islamic issues and foreign affairs. The company’s website depicts it dealing with leaders from countries with mixed relationships with the United States, including Pakistan, China, Russia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. One photo shows Turkey’s president, Recep Erdoğan, speaking in front of a banner that includes both the World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists and the Nonprofit Empowerment Group’s names. The website said Massey is also involved with the United Nations. Soon after the World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists submitted its last tax filing, the for-profit company found a new source of revenue: repurposing their company to get government contracts for — well, anything. According to its website NEGwebsitegov.com, “Nonprofit Empowerment Group Inc specializes in providing administrative management and general management consulting services.” In 2019, the company received a $10,000 contract for “writing courses” from the Navy, due to the Navy setting aside the job for a “woman-owned business.” In 2022, it received its first contract for “leadership development program services” from the Army, also reserved for a woman-owned business. As recently as June 2025 — this time without reserving the work for a minority — the Army gave the Nonprofit Empowerment Group its latest contract for the “professional services of an academic institution regionally accredited by an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.” “The Contractor will be responsible for providing graduate level instruction” on “leadership development skills,” a contracting document said. The Nonprofit Empowerment Group is not an academic institution: a more detailed version of the contracting requirements contains a loophole that also permits “an entity that has access to an accredited academic institution.” According to Massey’s LinkedIn profile, she worked as a bank teller, then founded the company while simultaneously working as a “middle market” banker. The profile describes her as “a staunch supporter of economic and social justice.” The government subsidized that group through its contract for a leadership development course, paying it for activities the Army likely could have better organized itself — including introducing Army Corps of Engineers staff to members of Congress and other officials. A Pentagon official told The Daily Wire that the “absurd” and “sketchy” contracts were cancelled because they “don’t serve the national interest.” “There is no good reason that one part of the federal government should use taxpayer dollars to pay a third party in order to talk to another part of the federal government,” Assistant Secretary of the Army Adam Telle told The Daily Wire. “This is not only absurd, it’s also sketchy,” “We terminated these contracts because they are not only unnecessary, they also don’t serve the national interest, and they undermine the cohesion of the Army Civil Works mission. President Trump has empowered us to cut ties with organizations that aren’t aligned with our priorities, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” he said. The move comes as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is cracking down on minority contracting, saying, “In many, many instances, these socially disadvantaged businesses don’t even do work. They take a 10%, 20%, sometimes 50% fee off the top, then pass the contract off to a giant consulting firm … For decades, this program, 8(a), has been a breeding ground for fraud.” A quarter of all minority-contracting firms lost their certifications last month after failing to turn over records that would show whether they actually did the work, or simply subcontracted it to third parties. Related: How The Military Gave A Homeless Lesbian’s ‘Minority Contracting’ Firm $19 Million