Once upon a time in Washington, the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program – created to help “socially and economically disadvantaged” business owners snag federal contracts without a bidding brawl – quietly operated under the radar. Probably because most people would’ve called it what it increasingly looked like: a prejudiced, sexist, and racially stacked system ripe for abuse. The kind of setup where anyone paying attention would immediately start sniffing for corruption.

And sure enough, instead of Main Street success stories, we got something closer to a D.C. political thriller – complete with bribed officials and billions in no-bid contracts sliding into the wrong pockets.

Fox News reports that Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst recently declared that Biden’s expansion of these set-aside deals essentially “opened the floodgates to fraud,” citing a DOJ case where greedy operators and a government contractor allegedly funneled $550 million through a bribery network while insiders raked in the cash.

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She added how “sloppy oversight and weak enforcement measures allow 8(a) participants to act as pass-through entities, snagging unlimited no-bid deals with little transparency.”

Additionally, Ernst also pointed to an interview by James O’Keefe with a firm allegedly admitting “to violating federal law, using minority-owned status as a front to obtain $100M+ no-bid government contracts while outsourcing 80% of the work.”

Now, SBA Chief Kelly Loeffler has ordered a full-scale audit of the 8(a) program – yes, EVERYTHING going back 15 years – and she also demanded that 4,300 firms turn over years of financial records.

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Ernst is calling for an immediate halt to new no-bid awards until somebody figures out who actually deserves taxpayer money – and how much of it actually helped the intended entrepreneurs versus exotic vacations and oversized corporate yachts.

In short, what was pitched as equity and empowerment now reads like a cautionary tale about cronyism, loopholes, and the eternal Washington truth: if you hand out no-bid contracts, don’t be surprised when fraud creeps in and people start spending like it’s Monopoly money.