The Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program raise from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is good news for small businesses. The federal government relies on small businesses like Fairmont, WV-based A3L Federal Works, which provides technical support to federal contractors and agencies. A3L Federal Works just celebrated seven years and has no plans to slow down. CEO Roya Maher offers software development, cybersecurity, data analytics, and more in support of national security.
“The most important thing is supporting meaningful contracts for our national security,” Maher said. “We have NOAA cybersecurity, and we have DoD ABIS. They’re all for protecting our citizens and protecting our warfighters. We are supporting a meaningful cause, and I’m honored to be providing jobs for our local community and revive the IT jobs here and retain our smart graduating engineers so they can have good, high-paying jobs and not leave West Virginia.”
Despite the impact of the pandemic, the CARES Act has been instrumental in supporting small businesses, as well as, providing payments to larger defense contractors so that national security work can continue.
Layoffs Impacting the Cleared Industry
| New Relic | Portland-based, software company, New Relic announced plans to layoff 160 employees. The company points to revenue growth hitting the brakes and a build up of losses having an impact.
“In furtherance of this strategy shift, the company intends to reallocate some spending to increase its investment on research and development,” New Relic said in a regulatory filing. |
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Hiring impacting the Cleared Industry
| CACI | CACI has been selected as the contractor for a $700 million, five year DHS Blank Purchase Agreement. The DHS deal is to provide enterprise technology in support of their national security investigations.
CACI’s press release said, “CACI will support the full range of case types for DHS and their components. This award also expands the set of government customers to whom CACI provides national security investigations, which includes the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC).” With back-to-back contract awards flowing into the organization, CACI has an influx of new projects for cleared candidates. |
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Cleared Employer at Work: NOrthrop Grumman
Opportunity to Watch
While Palantir Technologies gets a lot of visibility when consumers are watching stocks, their government business can sometimes be a little misunderstood by the public. While they have commercial success, their government revenue last year was over $600 million. However, compared to larger players in the defense industry, that’s a drop in the bucket. But don’t be fooled by revenues. What Palantir is doing is addressing some of the Pentagon’s highest priorities. Don’t sleep on the reality that this organization is achieving. The DoD is after a do more with less approach, and Palantir is playing a key role in enhancing the war-fighter’s capabilities with all of the data that has been collected over the past 20 years of intelligence operations. And their contracts don’t just focus on the DoD; they have their hand in multiple federal agencies.
