Same Position, New Competitive Contract: Texas Recycles Its H-1B Staffing Awards

A deep dive on four H-1B-heavy staffing vendors from our staff-augmentation report finds the same HHSC position numbers — and in two cases the same worker’s surname — recurring across separate fiscal-year contracts, each one re-labeled ‘Competitive.’ Along the way, correcting a subject-line filter that missed every ITSAC-labeled contract nearly doubles what we previously reported these four vendors were paid: from $32.1M to $62.8M.

https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_itsac_position_recycling.php

No Law Against It? The Actual Legal Landscape Around H-1B Displacement

Told there’s no law stopping a Texas state contractor from staffing its work almost entirely with H-1B workers instead of Americans? We went through the actual statutes — IRCA’s citizenship-discrimination ban, the H-1B non-displacement attestation, the 2017 Buy American Hire American executive order, and Texas’s own contractor rules — to see what each really requires, who enforces it, and where each one’s reach stops.

https://guestworkervisas.com/h1b_displacement_legal_landscape.php

Zero Waivers, 326 New Hires: Texas’s H-1B Freeze Has No Enforcement Mechanism

Six months after Gov. Abbott froze new H-1B filings at Texas state agencies and public universities unless the Texas Workforce Commission grants written permission, zero institutions had requested that permission as of July 17 — while DOL data shows 326 new-hire H-1B filings certified anyway. Reporters who asked TWC to explain were pointed at the state’s public records law instead of getting an answer.

https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_h1b_freeze_zero_enforcement.php

A $1.3 Billion Staff Augmentation Pipeline Across Texas State Agencies

Following up on the TWC 2026 vendor list published this week, we ran the same H-1B cross-reference against Staff Augmentation contracts at every Texas state agency going back to 2013 — 5,853 contracts worth $1.346 billion, with the Health and Human Services Commission alone accounting for 44% of it. Of the 60 largest vendors, 29 are certified H-1B sponsors, several of them H-1B dependent staffing shops where 80-100% of their own LCA filings are for H-1B workers.

https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_staff_augmentation_h1b_sponsors.php

The full 5,853-contract dataset is also browsable and exportable by agency, vendor, and status:

https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_staff_augmentation_contracts.php

TWC’s Own 2026 Vendors Include Certified H-1B Sponsors

Texas Workforce Commission awarded .95M across 126 contracts in 2026. Cross-referencing that vendor list against this site’s own FY2026 H-1B LCA data turns up two IT vendors — including one hired for explicit Staff Augmentation — that are simultaneously certified H-1B sponsors elsewhere in their business.

https://guestworkervisas.com/twc_2026_contracts_h1b_sponsors.php

How Congress Built a Rubber Stamp: Inside the Law That Makes H-1B Denials Nearly Impossible

DOL’s own regulations limit review of a Labor Condition Application to checking for missing paperwork and “obvious inaccuracies” — not whether the employer’s attestation is actually true (20 CFR §655.740(a)(1)). GAO told Congress as much in 2011: the review is “cursory and limited by law,” and a DHS study found 21% of examined H-1B petitions involved fraud or technical violations. Eleven years of DOL’s own LCA and PERM disclosure data show what that produces — a 0.90% denial rate on 7.9 million H-1B filings since 2015, versus 4.72% for PERM, the sibling program that actually requires documented recruitment. This is a follow-up to our FLAG contract-history report: not who built the system that processes these applications, but what the law actually requires it to enforce.

https://guestworkervisas.com/lca_rubber_stamp_by_design.php

The Department of Labor Spent $4.65 Billion on Staffing Contracts. Nothing Requires a Dollar of It to Go to American Workers.

The Department of Labor Spent $4.65 Billion on Staffing Contracts. Nothing Requires a Dollar of It to Go to American Workers.

The agency whose own founding mission is “to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States” has spent $4.65 billion since FY2016 on IT-staffing and temporary-personnel contracts. We cross-referenced every vendor on that list against DOL’s own H-1B disclosure data, 2008–2026. What we can defend ranges from 1,244 to 1,707 certified H-1B positions inside the DC-area workforce of DOL’s own contractor base — and none of these contracts require the labor be American.

In 1975, I worked briefly for AMF Tuboscope in Port-Gentil, Gabon, on the West African coast. I was young, and I remember asking my manager why there weren’t more American kids like me working there. His answer has stuck with me for fifty years: America’s own labor arrangement with Gabon required local hires for every position except management. A poor West African nation had more leverage over its own labor market in 1975 than the United States government exercises over its own procurement dollars today.

— From the site founder’s personal recollection
DOL staffing/IT contract spend, FY2016–2026
$4.65B
746 vendors, 3,958 contract actions — temp/admin staffing & computer/IT-services NAICS codes
Vendors with zero H-1B history, ever
$1.60B
461 of 746 vendors — no filing under their name anywhere in 18 years of DOL’s own disclosure data
Plausible DC-area H-1B footprint
1,707
Certified H-1B filings, DC/MD/VA worksites, 2020–2026, at $2.17B of DOL-vendor companies
Most conservative estimate
1,244
Same filter, also excluding the four largest federal-wide primes (Booz Allen, Leidos, GDIT, BAE)
Why isn’t there a rule requiring this money go to American workers?

The H-1B program DOL administers is attestation-based, not verified. When a company files a Labor Condition Application, it attests that hiring the foreign worker won’t harm similarly-employed U.S. workers — but DOL doesn’t check that claim for most filers. Real scrutiny (recruitment documentation, displacement questions) only applies to the narrow category of “H-1B-dependent” employers. Everyone else’s compliance is the filing itself. Compare that to the PERM green-card process, which does require documented American recruitment before a foreign worker can be sponsored permanently. The gap between those two programs is exactly the gap this report is about.

And the idea of the government requiring domestic labor with its own money isn’t novel or radical — it already exists elsewhere in federal spending. The Buy American Act prefers domestic materials on federal purchases. Davis-Bacon rules set wage floors for federal construction labor. The Jones Act requires domestic vessels and crews for maritime shipping between U.S. ports. The federal government routinely decides taxpayer money should preferentially build American jobs — just not, currently, for the IT-staffing and professional-services dollars this report is about.

Three ways to count it — broad to conservative

Rather than pick one number, we built three, each narrower than the last. All three start from the same base: every DOL contractor in a staffing or IT-services spending category (NAICS 561320, 561311, 561330, 541511, 541512, 541519, 541990) since FY2016, cross-matched by company name against DOL’s own H-1B Labor Condition Application disclosure data, 2008–2026, then restricted to certified petitions at DC/MD/VA worksites filed 2020–2026 — the years and geography that plausibly overlap with these contracts.

Broadest — any DOL vendor with a confirmed H-1B filing anywhere
3,507
Mid — excluding Deloitte/Oracle-scale diversified & nonprofit filers
1,707
Narrowest — also excluding Booz Allen, Leidos, GDIT & BAE
1,244
What each tier removes: Tier 2 drops 29 vendors (1,802 of the raw 3,507 petitions, $162M in contracts) that are diversified national or global firms where DOL is a rounding error of their business — Deloitte Consulting, Deloitte & Touche, Oracle America, Gartner, Qualtrics, Palantir, IBM, AlixPartners, plus universities and nonprofit research institutes swept in by the same NAICS codes. Tier 3 additionally drops the four largest federal-focused primes — Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, General Dynamics IT, and BAE Systems Technology Solutions & Services — which, unlike Deloitte or Oracle, are overwhelmingly federal-contract businesses, but still serve dozens of agencies beyond DOL. Which of the three is “right” depends on how much benefit of the doubt you extend to a company whose federal book is bigger than the contract in front of you.
Where the mid-tier number comes from, vendor by vendor

The 91 vendors behind the 1,707 figure aren’t evenly distributed — a dozen companies account for two-thirds of it. These are the companies with the largest confirmed DC/MD/VA H-1B footprint among DOL’s own staffing and IT-services contractors.

Leidos, Inc.
266
Softrams LLC
197
Digital Management LLC
127
TechnoGen Inc.
124
Booz Allen Hamilton Inc
112
22nd Century Technologies Inc
71
Ampcus Inc
59
General Dynamics IT Inc
57
AINS LLC
41
Creative Systems & Consulting LLC
39
BAE Systems Tech Solutions & Services Inc
28
DISYS Solutions Inc
27
Largest single vendor
Certified H-1B filings, DC/MD/VA, 2020–2026
These twelve companies account for 1,148 of the 1,707 mid-tier petitions (67%). The remaining 79 vendors split the other 559 in small numbers — a handful of certified filings each, not concentrated bulk sponsorship.
What this can and can’t prove

This is a company-name cross-reference against federal spending and federal disclosure data, not a contract-by-contract audit. Be clear-eyed about the limits:

Name matching, not registered-address verification. Unlike our earlier Texas Attorney General staffing-contract report — where every match was checked against the vendor’s registered city and state — this analysis matches on normalized company legal name across a much larger federal dataset. We manually spot-checked the largest name mismatches (Peraton, Maximus, General Dynamics, BAE Systems, Accenture Federal Services, Buchanan & Edwards) for parent-company and subsidiary name variants, but did not do this for all 746 vendors.

A certified LCA reflects a company’s H-1B workforce, not a specific contract assignment. No public dataset ties an individual visa holder to an individual government contract. Restricting to DC/MD/VA worksites and the 2020–2026 filing window narrows the set to plausible DOL-contract labor, not confirmed placement — these workers could equally be staffing any other federal agency’s contract with the same company.

We used certified petition counts, not the LCA’s own “worker positions” field. That field is frequently a round-number batch-filing ceiling employers request (25, 50, 100) rather than a confirmed hire count. One certified LCA case number is the more conservative unit, and it’s what all three totals above are built from.

What this means

The Department of Labor exists, by its own founding statute, to “foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States” and “advance opportunities for profitable employment.” It has also spent $4.65 billion of taxpayer money since FY2016 on staffing and IT-services contracts, and by even the most conservative count we can defend, at least 1,244 certified H-1B positions sit inside the Washington-area workforce of the companies holding those contracts — with no requirement anywhere in the process that any of it go to an American worker first.

The federal government already accepts the principle that its own money should build American jobs: the Buy American Act does it for materials, Davis-Bacon does it for construction wages, the Jones Act does it for shipping. A poor West African nation applied the same principle to a foreign oil-services contractor in 1975 without a second thought. The question this report leaves open isn’t whether that kind of requirement is possible — it plainly is, elsewhere in the same federal government. It’s why the Department of Labor’s own contracts don’t have one.

Data: USASpending.gov federal contract awards, Department of Labor, NAICS 561320/561311/561330/541511/541512/541519/541990, FY2016–2026 · DOL/OFLC H-1B LCA disclosure data, 2008–2026, cross-matched by employer legal name.

Bansar Technologies’ Real Texas Footprint: The OAG Contract Was One Desk in a Much Bigger Shop

Bansar Technologies’ real Texas footprint: the OAG contract was one desk in a much bigger shop

Our original count — $8.98 million across 32 Office of the Attorney General contracts — was accurate for that one agency. It also turned out to be 6.4% of what Bansar Technologies actually does with the State of Texas. Pulling the same statewide procurement registry that fed the original report, but without filtering to a single agency, shows Bansar holding 534 contracts worth $141.3 million across 23 different Texas agencies since 2014, still growing, and still winning renewals without the individual placements ever going back out to competitive bid. We ran the same check against the other 13 confirmed H-1B-sponsor vendors from the original report: the pattern isn’t unique to Bansar.

Bansar’s statewide TX contract value, 2014–2026
$141.3M
534 contracts across 23 agencies — vs. $8.98M/32 contracts at OAG alone
OAG’s share of Bansar’s real footprint
6.4%
The original report’s full scope was one-sixteenth of the company’s TX government business
Growth, 2020 → 2021
3.7×
$6.66M in new awards in 2020 to $24.47M in 2021, and it never came back down
Cash actually paid, H1 2026 alone
$10.75M
412 real Comptroller disbursements across 22 agencies, Jan–Jun 2026 — this is live money, not just contract ceilings
Bansar Technologies’ 10 largest Texas customers, by contract value

The Office of the Attorney General — the entire subject of the original report — is Bansar’s 7th-largest customer. Health and Human Services Commission alone is 4.5× the size of the OAG relationship, spread across 214 separate staff-augmentation contracts since 2015.

Health and Human Services Commission $40.19M (214 contracts) Family & Protective Services $16.38M (91) Dept. of Transportation $13.64M (16) Railroad Commission $12.81M (26) State Health Services $9.83M (51) Texas Workforce Commission $9.58M (11) Office of the Attorney General $8.98M (32) — the original report’s full scope Dept. of Motor Vehicles $7.57M (18) Comptroller of Public Accounts $4.58M (20) Dept. of Agriculture $2.93M (6)
Largest customer
Office of the Attorney General (the original report’s scope)
Other agencies
New contract value awarded per year, statewide

Bansar’s Texas business roughly quadrupled between 2020 and 2021 and never receded — it has held at $20–26 million in new awards every year since, across an expanding roster of agencies. The jump lines up with the pandemic-era staffing surge at the state’s two largest human-services agencies, HHSC and DFPS, which together account for 40% of Bansar’s all-time total.

$0M $10M $20M $30M $1.0M 2014 $4.2M 2015 $4.4M 2016 $2.3M 2017 $0.3M 2018 $5.7M 2019 $6.7M 2020 $24.5M 2021 $26.3M 2022 $20.8M 2023 $21.4M 2024 $21.8M 2025 $2.1M 2026*
Sustained post-2020 plateau ($20M+/yr)
Pre-surge / partial year
*2026 is partial (through April). At the current pace it’s on track to land in the same $20M+ range as every year since 2021.
How the renewals actually work — and why “competitive” doesn’t mean what it sounds like

The state’s own procurement-method field labels 527 of Bansar’s 534 contracts (98.7%) “Competitive.” Taken at face value, that looks like a clean record. It isn’t measuring what it sounds like it’s measuring.

We obtained three consecutive Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission purchase orders for a single Bansar contractor, Raja Konda, QA Manager on TABC’s IT modernization project: PO 24-40268 ($146,300, term 12/31/23–8/31/24), PO 25-40078 ($224,000, term 9/1/24–8/31/25), and PO 26-40053 ($224,000, term 9/1/25–8/31/26) — $594,300 total, three different contract numbers, zero-day gaps between each expiration and the next award. Each renewal was justified by a one-page “Best Value Statement” from TABC’s IT PMO manager arguing Konda specifically should be kept on: “he is the best person to perform these key and impactful duties.” TABC’s own internal procurement checklist — requiring three competing DIR vendor bids for purchases this size — has its verification boxes left unchecked on all three POs.

The “Competitive” label in the state’s contracts data refers to the one-time solicitation that established Bansar’s master DIR staffing contract (DIR-CPO-4534, renewed in 2024 as DIR-CPO-5452) — not to any individual agency’s decision to keep the same named person in the same seat, year after year. Every Bansar renewal we could check followed this shape, including one that names Konda directly in the statewide contracts registry itself: line item “ITSAC Bansar Contractor_ R. Konda,” recorded twice under TABC.

The state’s contract-numbering system compounds the problem: TABC issued three completely different contract IDs (24-40268, 25-00026, C2600032) for the same person’s three consecutive years in the same job — so nothing in the statewide dataset alone can link a renewal chain back together without the underlying paperwork. The cleanest lower-bound estimate we could extract from the data itself: 179 of Bansar’s 534 contracts ($34.9M, 24.7% of total value) explicitly self-describe as a fiscal-year renewal in their own subject line (e.g., “FY21 DIR IT Staff Augmentation”). The true renewal share is almost certainly higher — most of the remaining contracts carry generic “Staff Aug” labels that don’t self-identify either way.
Not just Bansar: the same statewide check on all 14 confirmed H-1B vendors

We ran the identical statewide pull for every vendor from the original report. In every case but one, the OAG relationship was a small fraction of the vendor’s real Texas government business — confirming this is a structural feature of how Texas buys IT staffing, not a Bansar-specific story.

Vendor Statewide contracts Statewide value Agencies OAG value (original report) Statewide ÷ OAG
Allied Consultants 347 $223.5M 25 $1.31M 171×
Bansar Technologies 534 $141.3M 23 $8.98M 15.7×
Apex Systems 215 $116.9M 21 $99K 1,179×
TEKsystems 164 $86.7M 21 $986K–$1.39M¹ 62–88×
E-Consulting 125 $38.2M 12 $1.51M 25×
Esolvit 115 $30.0M 15 $1.95M 15×
22nd Century Technologies 81 $23.9M 15 $1.54M 16×
Conquest Consulting 82 $19.8M 10 $2.52M 7.8×
Steck Systems 92 $18.0M 12 $2.00M
Idea Technologies 72 $13.1M 9 $348K 38×
Objectwin Technology 30 $13.0M 5 $181K 72×
Cogent Infotech 34 $10.4M 12 $1.78M 5.8×
Red Salsa Technologies 14 $4.51M² 8 $818K 5.5×
Actium 11 $3.47M 3 $3.25M 1.1×
¹ TEKsystems’ four “Completed” OAG contracts (2015–2017) total exactly $985,592, matching the original report’s snapshot. Three more “Active” OAG contracts have been awarded since (FY25–26, $408,150), which is genuine growth, not a data error. ² Corrected after finding a likely duplicate record: the state’s contracts registry logged one Red Salsa/OAG placement twice under two different contract-numbering systems ($575,640 legacy-format vs. $459,342 PO-format, same dates, same job). Removing the duplicate brings both the OAG figure and the statewide total back in line with the original report.

Allied Consultants is Bansar’s largest peer by dollar value, but a different kind of business. Roughly half of its $223.5M ($112M) comes from about 10 large enterprise systems-integration contracts — including two separate awards to help build and maintain CAPPS, the statewide payroll/HR platform every Texas agency (including TABC) runs on — rather than individually-placed staffing contractors. It is a confirmed, ongoing H-1B sponsor in its own right (PeopleSoft/HR-systems and technical-recruiting roles), but its dollar total isn’t a like-for-like comparison to Bansar’s body-shop model.

Actium is the exception that proves the rule. It’s the one vendor on this list whose Texas government business really is concentrated at OAG — 94% of its entire $3.47M statewide total is the same relationship the original report described.

Methodology note for this follow-up

This addendum draws on the same Texas Comptroller/DIR statewide contracts registry that fed the original report (confirmed: our pull reproduces the original report’s OAG figures for 10 of the 14 vendors within a percent or two). “Current Contract Value” in that registry is a not-to-exceed ceiling set at award, the same caveat that applies to LCA “worker positions” figures — it isn’t confirmed spend. We cross-checked it against the Comptroller’s actual payment-disbursement records: Bansar alone was paid $10.75 million in real cash across 22 agencies in just the first six months of 2026, so the ceiling figures in this piece are not sitting unused. In the course of this analysis we found and corrected one likely duplicate contract record (Red Salsa/OAG, detailed above) and flag Allied Consultants’ bare “ALLIED CONSULTANTS” vendor-name variant as verified — same underlying vendor ID as “Allied Consultants Inc” across all name-string variants, not a name collision.

What this means

The original report’s number was real, but it was a keyhole view. Bansar Technologies’ relationship with the Texas Attorney General’s office isn’t an outlier arrangement between one small Austin vendor and one agency — it’s the smallest visible slice of a $141 million, 23-agency, decade-plus staffing operation that has quadrupled since 2020 and shows no sign of slowing. And the mechanism that keeps it running — a single competitively-awarded master contract, followed by an unbroken chain of sole-source “best value” renewals for specific named individuals, each one issued a fresh contract number that erases the chain from public view — isn’t specific to Bansar either. Twelve of the other thirteen confirmed H-1B-sponsor vendors from the original report show the same pattern, just at different scales. Texas’s own procurement transparency data can tell you how much money moved and to whom. It cannot, on its own, tell you how many times the same person was renewed into the same job without ever being put back up for competition — that took the underlying agency paperwork to see.

Data: guestworkervisas.com Contract Registry (Texas Comptroller/DIR statewide procurement disclosure data, all agencies, 2013–2026) · Texas Comptroller payment-disbursement records (Jan–Jun 2026) · DOL/OFLC H-1B LCA disclosure data · Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission purchase orders 24-40268, 25-40078, and 26-40053 (obtained separately) · DIR-CPO-4534 / DIR-CPO-5452 contract records.