I can't speak to federal-level contracting, and I can't speak to much contracting outside the Pacific Northwest and parts of the east coast, but this is largely

I can't speak to federal-level contracting, and I can't speak to much contracting outside the Pacific Northwest and parts of the east coast, but this is largely untrue. In virtually every capital construction project I've seen or been aware of, the prime is always a regional, national, or multinational company, with capacity to do a lot of the work themselves; they do sub out work, but that is the layer at which they're expected to hire a certain amount of historically underutilized companies. Usually they're given goals of 30-40% contract spend on historically underutilized companies, and they usually miss it by about 10%. This is considered a success, because in the past, they wouldn't hire such businesses at all. In the past, minority-owned and woman-owned businesses would simply never be hired for the ongoing well-paid government capital construction projects. All of this is now extensively tracked, as well, though the information is not easy to come by. I know a few people who regularly FOIA their city procurement offices to get the information, and it's there, just not publicly distributed. It's tracked at the city level, county level, and always state DOT level (though not necessarily other departments; DOTs have extra tracking requirements because of their reliance on federal funding). In deference to your story, I know several people who have an anecdote about "a woman who ran a business and added a 10% markup to contracts, passing everything through to someone else" -- the individual changes, the markup changes, but the story's the same, and the implication is always that it's a scam, the system is rife with fraud, tear it all down, etc., and that is simply untrue by the numbers. It's an anecdote to reinforce personal biases, not a reflection of the world.