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.