John Bickley

And they probably got a shared bank account anyway.

So it's almost impossible to police.

But the program was created way back in 1978, mostly to help black people.

But now we have a much more complex ethnic situation in America.

And you have a situation where, for example, people from the country of India get preference for contracts, even though they have a higher median income than white people.

They're overrepresented, obviously, in fields like IT, which, by the way, didn't even exist prior to civil rights.

But, you know, one of the things I'm going to tell the Senate is that the scandal here is a little different than people might think.

I mean, it is a DEI program, but really what it is at its core is it's a loophole exploited by the government and big corporations.

You heard Accenture mentioned in that video to circumvent competitive bidding.

Yeah, pretty much.

I mean, they just wanted to get money out the door to a regular firm quickly without doing the paperwork.

And so this minority contracting program was a convenient mechanism to do this.

But the problem is we have competitive bidding for a reason.

I mean, is steering money to particular firms with no sort of assessment of whether it's the best price or these are the best people to do the work, this is like something out of Russia.

It enables corruption.

And it inflates the cost of everything because you have these middlemen skimming off the top.

But, you know, we've all kind of known that this has been going on for years.

I mean, it's really a swampy thing where both sides were looking the other way.

Native Americans, but also Alaskan natives, can get even bigger contracts with no competition.

And so for years, the head of appropriations in the Senate was a Republican senator from Alaska.