Join the effort to keep federal contracting a vital Indian Country opportunity

(Editor’s note: Lance Morgan, CEO of Ho-Chunk Inc., the tribal development corporation of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, is the guest author for this post.)

One key to Indian Country’s economic development is to build on our past successes. In this post I want to describe how Indian Country arrived where we are today and offer a way for you to help continue the progress.

There are so many obstacles to being successful economically if you are a tribe. Gaming and natural resource development has really made a difference for some tribes, but the majority are still struggling to overcome the myriad legal, political and economic obstacles that all tribes face when trying to develop or diversify their economies.

The federal contracting opportunity has been around for some time. It started in the 1970s and ’80s with tribes performing sub-contracting for large prime contractors. The prime contractors got incentives for using tribal entities. The jobs provided to the tribes were desperately needed, but it was hard for the tribes to advance beyond simply providing low-cost labor.

In the mid 1980s, Congress passed laws establishing the Tribal 8a program. The 8a program allowed tribal entities to become prime contractors. Not many tribes benefited from the program initially, but as tribal corporations became more common, the program began to make large impacts in Indian Country during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Under the 8a program, tribes were able to bring in a variety of expertise by working with partners to jointly go after large government contracts. Being the prime contractor is more lucrative than being the sub-contractor, and it also requires the tribes to be involved in all aspects of the contracting process. No longer were we just given a simple task to perform as a sub-contractor. We had to develop the knowledge and skills sets to run the entire operation. This knowledge combined with the program’s incentives created a system in which we could thrive. 

As intended by Congress, tribes started doing well —  a little too well apparently. The companies who used to view us as low-cost labor now had to face us as competitors. Well this is still America, and we are still tribes. The larger and politically-connected government contracting companies lobbied to change the system and put in place some severe limitations on the Tribal 8a program and want to do away with the program completely, I suspect.

Tribes need to support government contracting because it is really one the fastest and best ways to grow a tribal company quickly. If done correctly, a tribe can go from nothing to millions in revenue in a just a few short years, which can make a huge impact in tribal communities. 

If you are interested in learning more or helping out with the fight to preserve tribal contracting rights, then I would suggest going to the Native American Contractors Association’s website, where you can find everything you need to get involved!