Rhonda Valles is an aspiring California musician who once played in a band with her ex-lover, Monica Salci. In between writing and performing songs, Valles and Salci formed a company that purported to make clothes.
The company never produced a stitch. The federal government paid it $19 million.
The spectacle demonstrates the absurdity of 8(a) contracting law, which requires that that 5% of all federal government contracts be “set aside” for minority-, women-owned, and other “disadvantaged” businesses. The program — which Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said this month has resulted in $100 million contracts going out the door without competitive bidding nearly every day — has led to paydays for flagrant middlemen who use their disadvantaged status to win government contracts, only to subcontract the work to larger firms.
Valles and Salci registered a company called Romo Productions with the Small Business Administration as a Self-Certified Small Disadvantaged Business, a Woman Owned Business, and a Hispanic American Owned Business. According to her music biography, Valles’s father is “German/Irish/Spanish.”
That certification, which gave it a fast-track to government contracts, was the business: its website dedicated more space to the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) logos than to its own name.
“ROMO Productions offers two advantages; quality, scaled production and woman owned small business. This means Government buyers can meet their small business set aside needs and receive well built products that are delivered on schedule,” a profile said.
‘I got this government contract, do you know anyone with a factory who can help me perform it?’
Between 2009 and 2017, multiple military branches agreed to pay up to $72 million to the firm, ultimately shelling out just under $19 million to produce physical training outfits, federal spending records show. Some were awarded without competition as an “8(a) sole source,” while others were set aside for “small businesses.”
But Romo Productions never had the infrastructure to produce clothes. Brad Thompson, a white male to whom Valles subcontracted the work, recalls how she first approached him.
“She said ‘I got this government contract, do you know anyone with a factory who can help me perform it?’ She was literally living in her car,” he told The Daily Wire. “I said ‘I can help you.'”
Thompson’s company, BT Apparel, was one of three factories that produced clothing for Romo Productions. Thompson sent the clothing to a space where Valles’ band practiced, and she forwarded the packages on to the military, he said.
“She never owned a machine … I had 100 employees,” he said. “The whole 8(a) thing is a farce.”
During that time, Valles and Salci performed their song “Token,” which includes the lyric “I need a token. Shut up boy, won’t you be my token”:
Government inspectors visited Thompson’s factory to ensure compliance with rules such as the Berry Amendment, which requires military products to be made in the United States. Thompson says he heard Valles giving the impression that she owned it. “I started to think there was something fraudulent going on,” he said.
He hired a lawyer to obtain a copy of the government contract using public records laws, and found that Valles was obligated to own the facilities that were performing the work, he said. The military had apparently never verified that she did.
Once Valles realized that Thompson was onto the scheme — a common occurrence in minority contracting, called a “pass-through” — she demanded he give her ownership of his business, which would make her more than a middle-woman: “Sell me 10% of your business for $1 and I’ll keep giving you work,” he recalled her saying.
The owners of the other two factories also began to suspect that Valles was simply siphoning government dollars as a middle-woman. Valles used legal threats and the prospect of withholding work to keep them as indentured servants.
She drafted a letter, intended for signature by Thompson, that said “I, Brad Thompson, have no further interest in obtaining pricing information from the USMC with respect to the above stated contract.”
Another document reviewed by The Daily Wire, with blank signature lines for the owners of the three factories, read: “We believe that what is best for Romo, is best for us. We do not now or ever want to make you think that we would try to take anything away from you.”
Thompson likened the move to extortion, and said when he refused to sign over ownership of his business, Valles abruptly pulled the work from his factory and even cast a curse on him. “Within three weeks it was all gone because I wouldn’t play ball,” he said.
Valles sued the second factory, Paradise Sewing, asking that it “be permanently restrained and enjoined from using misappropriated confidential information.” To support her case, she filed a contract that seemed to lay out her intent to commit a set-aside contracting pass-through scheme:
ROMO desires to retain sewing services of Paradise… to US Gov military apparel, from this day forward but has the following expectations:
Valles later filed a statement to the judge complaining about her own lawyer, because he “told me I was not going to win” and “that I ‘was behaving like a 3yr old.'” In 2018, a California appeals court ordered her to pay Paradise’s attorneys fees, and Romo Productions collapsed.
But it’s unclear that the federal government ever sanctioned it. Romo’s website says it has an “A+ Contract Past Performance Rating” and received a “certificate of appreciation” from the Marine Corps.
Valles told The Daily Wire via email that she is “more interested in the health of the planet, feminine energy (yin) and cooperative kindness rather than male dominated competitive evil war profiteers.”
“In a stupid male dominated world especially this world being a woman alone is a disadvantage,” she added, railing against “evil feudal lords evil Jews slavery is still here.”
She said she is “starting a coalition for women to run the planet. Peace and Light and Love-like the Orca Whales. Raise the frequency of the planet. Male energy is heavy and war like and long overdue for a reduction.”
A Department of War spokesman declined to discuss Romo Productions. But speaking on 8(a) contracts earlier this month, Hegseth noted that “In many, many instances, these socially disadvantaged businesses don’t even do work. They take a 10%, 20%, sometimes 50% fee off the top, then pass the contract off to a giant consulting firm.”
“We’re doing away with these pass-through schemes,” Hegseth said, vowing that contracts not benefiting “lethality” would simply be ended.
After the fallout, Thompson’s company looked into getting government contracts itself, but he found that bureaucrats seemed to knowingly write contracts that necessitated middlemen in order to meet their “small” and “disadvantaged” business quotas.
“It’s like ‘procure apparel with an Under Armour logo.’ Obviously they should just get them from Under Armour,” he said.
The Romo Productions contract was for the procurement of New Balance clothes — something only New Balance, which is not a small business, had the license to produce. To convince New Balance to allow other factories to produce clothes with its logo, the company had to be paid a licensing fee that gave it the same profit as if the contract had gone directly to it, he said.
With Romo Productions gone, Valles now markets herself as the “‘Oz behind the curtain’ of many of the industry’s top Made in USA/Berry Compliant tactical apparel brands from 2008-present.” She says she consults with other companies that want to do business with the military to help them with “sourcing/compliance.”
Valles’s band also broke up, as did her relationship with Salci. But both women are still seeking fame and fortune. Salci has pivoted to Christian pop. A song she wrote with Valles might well have been about the time the United States government put a California beach bum on a fast track to the military-industrial complex because she had a Spaniard grandparent.
Color me red
Color me white
Color me black
Just color me right
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