Every active federal contract in FY2026 whose own description says “staff augmentation” or a close synonym, grouped by the company supplying the labor, cross-referenced against H-1B disclosure data to see whether the same companies also sponsor guest workers.
H-1B
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
Texas Universities Kept Filing New H-1B Petitions After Abbott’s Freeze
Gov. Abbott ordered Texas state agencies and public universities to stop filing new H-1B petitions starting January 27, 2026. DOL disclosure data shows a real one-month compliance dip, then a return to pre-freeze filing volume by April.
https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_public_universities_h1b_freeze.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 | 9× |
| 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× |
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.
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.
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.