Keep this in mind when you see stories of how DOGE is "harming the disabled."
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 15, 2025
There's a massive looting operation ongoing, and the poor and disabled as being used as human shields for economic terrorists with the ethics of Hamas. https://t.co/ehjyFlhpYS
AbilityOne is the most insane federal program I've found yet.
It's a $4 billion per-year jobs program for the disabled that is so wasteful, and vulnerable to abuse and fraud that even the National Council on Disability recommended eliminating it: ncd.gov/assets/uploads…Basically it seems to work like this:
First, a nonprofit called SourceAmerica keeps a list of nonprofits that manufacture goods or provide services with at least 75% of their workforce seriously disabled.
Remember that SourceAmerica keeps the list, this is important.Once you get on the list, you're set.
Next, the federal AbilityOne commission votes to place certain goods or services (soap, maintenance work, rubber gloves, etc.) on the "procurement list"
The "procurement list" is insanely powerful...You see, once something is on the procurement list all contracts for purchasing that good/service MUST be awarded to a member of SourceAmerica's special list of nonprofits.
No competitive bidding of the contract is allowed. It HAS TO go to a group on the list.I mentioned earlier that SourceAmerica creates the list of nonprofits that can get these special contracts.
Well, SourceAmerica also advises the AbilityOne commission on the price of the contract AND they get to choose which nonprofit on the list gets the contract!That already sounds kinda crazy, right?
Well, on top of that, SourceAmerica gets paid a 3.8% fee for EVERY. SINGLE. CONTRACT.
In 2023, SourceAmerica got paid $100 MILLION in fees from the $4+ billion in AbilityOne contracts distributed to groups on their list.Already this sounds like a scam, but wait there's more!
There are no rules on where this fee money can go, a problem noted in the report, and SourceAmerica uses it to give senior staff enormous salaries, and spends hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on lobbying.So, SourceAmerica has the power to get the AbilityOne commission to bottle-neck pretty much any contract that they want to nonprofits on a special list that they control, and they get a 3% cut of every contract.
What do they do in return for the fee? Nobody really knows.Well, that all sounds bad, but how many jobs for the disabled does AbilityOne create?
37,000, or 1 job for every $110,000 of contracts.
AND the National Council on Disability report found that nobody was actually checking if nonprofit workers were actually disabled!Furthermore they found that while the number of disabled people employed by AbilityOne was decreasing, the total dollars spent on AbilityOne contracts was going up.
SourceAmerica fee revenues were also increasing while the percentage of contract $ going to wages decreased.It's all utterly insane, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface here.It looks like AbilityOne has the contracts for most maintenance, clerical work, cafeterias, etc. on military bases.
Those contract should go to the best and most affordable bidder, not an NGO job program that barely provides jobs and skims tons off the top to a random nonprofit• • •
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