At a congressional oversight hearing in 2019, Linda McMahon, then head of the Small Business Administration, lavished praise on a Native Hawaiian defense contractor as a shining example of a federal program designed to uplift Indigenous people.

Christopher Dawson and his companies had won hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid government contracts through the SBA based on the promise that his profits would primarily be used to help Native Hawaiians by, in part, promoting the culture, building homes and supporting orphaned children.

Two months before the hearing, however, a former employee had met with federal investigators and filed a whistleblower lawsuit accusing Dawson and executives of cheating the SBA’s 8(a) program. That program, which dates to the 1960s, was designed to help business owners from historically disadvantaged groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, to win federal contracts. For Native American tribes, Alaska Native corporations and certain Native Hawaiian nonprofits, such as Dawson’s Hawaiian Native Corp., the opportunity comes with no cap on the size of those no-bid contracts.

Internal company records and other documents in the SBA’s possession would later show just how much Dawson had indulged. There were private jets and Porsches, luxury homes in Hawaii and Florida, memberships to private social clubs, and a nearly $1 million annual salary. Dawson also funneled millions into polo, investing in a beachfront horse farm on Oahu’s famed North Shore and a horse breeding operation in Argentina.