{"id":657,"date":"2026-08-11T17:05:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T22:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/?p=657"},"modified":"2026-08-11T17:05:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T22:05:45","slug":"the-department-of-labor-spent-4-65-billion-on-staffing-contracts-nothing-requires-a-dollar-of-it-to-go-to-american-workers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/the-department-of-labor-spent-4-65-billion-on-staffing-contracts-nothing-requires-a-dollar-of-it-to-go-to-american-workers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Department of Labor Spent $4.65 Billion on Staffing Contracts. Nothing Requires a Dollar of It to Go to American Workers."},"content":{"rendered":"<style>.viz-root { color-scheme: light; --surface-1: #fcfcfb; --page: #f9f9f7; --text-primary: #0b0b0b; --text-secondary: #52514e; --text-muted: #898781; --gridline: #e1e0d9; --baseline: #c3c2b7; --border: rgba(11,11,11,0.10); --series-1: #2a78d6; --series-2: #eb6834; --series-3: #4c9a5b; --callout-bg: #f0efec; } @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { :root:where(:not([data-theme=\"light\"])) .viz-root { color-scheme: dark; --surface-1: #1a1a19; --page: #0d0d0d; --text-primary: #ffffff; --text-secondary: #c3c2b7; --text-muted: #898781; --gridline: #2c2c2a; --baseline: #383835; --border: rgba(255,255,255,0.10); --series-1: #3987e5; --series-2: #d95926; --series-3: #5cb56d; --callout-bg: #232322; } } :root[data-theme=\"dark\"] .viz-root { color-scheme: dark; --surface-1: #1a1a19; --page: #0d0d0d; --text-primary: #ffffff; --text-secondary: #c3c2b7; --text-muted: #898781; --gridline: #2c2c2a; --baseline: #383835; 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} }<\/style>\n<div class=\"viz-root\">\n<div class=\"wrap\">\n<h1>The Department of Labor Spent $4.65 Billion on Staffing Contracts. Nothing Requires a Dollar of It to Go to American Workers.<\/h1>\n<p class=\"subtitle\">The agency whose own founding mission is &#8220;to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States&#8221; has spent $4.65 billion since FY2016 on IT-staffing and temporary-personnel contracts. We cross-referenced every vendor on that list against DOL&#8217;s own H-1B disclosure data, 2008&ndash;2026. What we can defend ranges from 1,244 to 1,707 certified H-1B positions inside the DC-area workforce of DOL&#8217;s own contractor base &mdash; and none of these contracts require the labor be American.<\/p>\n<div class=\"anecdote\">\nIn 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&#8217;t more American kids like me working there. His answer has stuck with me for fifty years: America&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<div class=\"attrib\">&mdash; From the site founder&#8217;s personal recollection<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-row\">\n<div class=\"stat-tile\">\n<div class=\"stat-label\">DOL staffing\/IT contract spend, FY2016&ndash;2026<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-value\">$4.65B<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-sub\">746 vendors, 3,958 contract actions &mdash; temp\/admin staffing &amp; computer\/IT-services NAICS codes<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-tile\">\n<div class=\"stat-label\">Vendors with zero H-1B history, ever<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-value\">$1.60B<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-sub\">461 of 746 vendors &mdash; no filing under their name anywhere in 18 years of DOL&#8217;s own disclosure data<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-tile\">\n<div class=\"stat-label\">Plausible DC-area H-1B footprint<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-value\">1,707<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-sub\">Certified H-1B filings, DC\/MD\/VA worksites, 2020&ndash;2026, at $2.17B of DOL-vendor companies<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-tile\">\n<div class=\"stat-label\">Most conservative estimate<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-value\">1,244<\/div>\n<div class=\"stat-sub\">Same filter, also excluding the four largest federal-wide primes (Booz Allen, Leidos, GDIT, BAE)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"card\">\n<div class=\"card-title\">Why isn&#8217;t there a rule requiring this money go to American workers?<\/div>\n<p class=\"card-desc\">The H-1B program DOL administers is <b>attestation-based, not verified<\/b>. When a company files a Labor Condition Application, it attests that hiring the foreign worker won&#8217;t harm similarly-employed U.S. workers &mdash; but DOL doesn&#8217;t check that claim for most filers. Real scrutiny (recruitment documentation, displacement questions) only applies to the narrow category of &#8220;H-1B-dependent&#8221; employers. Everyone else&#8217;s compliance <i>is<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"card-desc\">And the idea of the government requiring domestic labor with its own money isn&#8217;t novel or radical &mdash; 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 &mdash; just not, currently, for the IT-staffing and professional-services dollars this report is about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"card\">\n<div class=\"card-title\">Three ways to count it &mdash; broad to conservative<\/div>\n<p class=\"card-desc\">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&#8217;s own H-1B Labor Condition Application disclosure data, 2008&ndash;2026, then restricted to <b>certified<\/b> petitions at <b>DC\/MD\/VA worksites<\/b> filed <b>2020&ndash;2026<\/b> &mdash; the years and geography that plausibly overlap with these contracts.<\/p>\n<div class=\"chart-scroll\">\n<div class=\"bar-chart\">\n<div class=\"bar-row tier-row\">\n<div class=\"tier-label\">Broadest &mdash; any DOL vendor with a confirmed H-1B filing anywhere<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-500\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">3,507<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row tier-row\">\n<div class=\"tier-label\">Mid &mdash; excluding Deloitte\/Oracle-scale diversified &amp; nonprofit filers<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-2 w-243\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">1,707<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row tier-row\">\n<div class=\"tier-label\">Narrowest &mdash; also excluding Booz Allen, Leidos, GDIT &amp; BAE<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-3 w-177\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">1,244<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"callout\"><b>What each tier removes:<\/b> 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 &mdash; Deloitte Consulting, Deloitte &amp; 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 <i>federal-focused<\/i> primes &mdash; Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, General Dynamics IT, and BAE Systems Technology Solutions &amp; Services &mdash; which, unlike Deloitte or Oracle, are overwhelmingly federal-contract businesses, but still serve dozens of agencies beyond DOL. Which of the three is &#8220;right&#8221; 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.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"card\">\n<div class=\"card-title\">Where the mid-tier number comes from, vendor by vendor<\/div>\n<p class=\"card-desc\">The 91 vendors behind the 1,707 figure aren&#8217;t evenly distributed &mdash; 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&#8217;s own staffing and IT-services contractors.<\/p>\n<div class=\"chart-scroll\">\n<div class=\"bar-chart\">\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">Leidos, Inc.<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-2 w-500\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">266<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">Softrams LLC<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-370\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">197<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">Digital Management LLC<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-239\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">127<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">TechnoGen Inc.<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-233\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">124<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">Booz Allen Hamilton Inc<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-211\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">112<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">22nd Century Technologies Inc<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-134\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">71<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">Ampcus Inc<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-111\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">59<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">General Dynamics IT Inc<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-107\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">57<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">AINS LLC<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-77\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">41<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">Creative Systems &amp; Consulting LLC<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-73\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">39<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">BAE Systems Tech Solutions &amp; Services Inc<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-53\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">28<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-row\">\n<div class=\"bar-label\">DISYS Solutions Inc<\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-track\">\n<div class=\"bar-fill bar-series-1 w-51\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bar-value\">27<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"legend\">\n<div class=\"legend-item\"><span class=\"legend-swatch bar-series-2\"><\/span><span>Largest single vendor<\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"legend-item\"><span class=\"legend-swatch bar-series-1\"><\/span><span>Certified H-1B filings, DC\/MD\/VA, 2020&ndash;2026<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"callout\">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 &mdash; a handful of certified filings each, not concentrated bulk sponsorship.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"card\">\n<div class=\"card-title\">What this can and can&#8217;t prove<\/div>\n<p class=\"card-desc\">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:<\/p>\n<div class=\"callout\">\n<b>Name matching, not registered-address verification.<\/b> Unlike our earlier Texas Attorney General staffing-contract report &mdash; where every match was checked against the vendor&#8217;s registered city and state &mdash; 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 &amp; Edwards) for parent-company and subsidiary name variants, but did not do this for all 746 vendors.<\/p>\n<p><b>A certified LCA reflects a company&#8217;s H-1B workforce, not a specific contract assignment.<\/b> No public dataset ties an individual visa holder to an individual government contract. Restricting to DC\/MD\/VA worksites and the 2020&ndash;2026 filing window narrows the set to <i>plausible<\/i> DOL-contract labor, not confirmed placement &mdash; these workers could equally be staffing any other federal agency&#8217;s contract with the same company.<\/p>\n<p><b>We used certified petition counts, not the LCA&#8217;s own &#8220;worker positions&#8221; field.<\/b> 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&#8217;s what all three totals above are built from.\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"card\">\n<div class=\"card-title\">What this means<\/div>\n<p class=\"card-desc\">The Department of Labor exists, by its own founding statute, to &#8220;foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States&#8221; and &#8220;advance opportunities for profitable employment.&#8221; 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 &mdash; with no requirement anywhere in the process that any of it go to an American worker first.<\/p>\n<p class=\"card-desc\">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&#8217;t whether that kind of requirement is possible &mdash; it plainly is, elsewhere in the same federal government. It&#8217;s why the Department of Labor&#8217;s own contracts don&#8217;t have one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<footer class=\"foot\">Data: USASpending.gov federal contract awards, Department of Labor, NAICS 561320\/561311\/561330\/541511\/541512\/541519\/541990, FY2016&ndash;2026 &middot; DOL\/OFLC H-1B LCA disclosure data, 2008&ndash;2026, cross-matched by employer legal name.<\/footer>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8220;to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States&#8221; has spent $4.65 billion since FY2016 on IT-staffing &#8230; <a title=\"The Department of Labor Spent $4.65 Billion on Staffing Contracts. Nothing Requires a Dollar of It to Go to American Workers.\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/the-department-of-labor-spent-4-65-billion-on-staffing-contracts-nothing-requires-a-dollar-of-it-to-go-to-american-workers\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about The Department of Labor Spent $4.65 Billion on Staffing Contracts. Nothing Requires a Dollar of It to Go to American Workers.\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-h-1b"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":659,"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions\/659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guestworkervisas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}