[Daily Wire] Few organizations know more about leadership than the United States Army. Yet for years, the Army paid an outside consultant for instruction on the topic: A fly-by-night company co-founded by a Pakistani who sits on the board of an organization once linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.Between 2021 and 2025, the Army Corps of Engineers shelled out $1.7 million across eight contracts to the vaguely-named Nonprofit Empowerment Group. The group is actually a for-profit, bare-bones operation configured to scoop up federal contracts using woman-owned "set-asides."
The company’s only listed employee is a former bank teller who hardly seemed to meet the government’s call for an academic institution to provide "graduate level instruction" on "leadership development skills." Yet the so-called "Nonprofit Empowerment Group" advertised a qualification that helped it gain access to the military: Its status as a "Disadvantaged Women Small Owned Business" [sic].
The saga raises questions about whether the government’s affirmative action contracting law, known as 8(a), not only wastes money by padding the wallets of middlemen, but could potentially undermine readiness and even risk foreign influence. The Army canceled the Nonprofit Endowment Group’s contracts this week, the Daily Wire can exclusively report.
Its only known employee, Angela Massey, declined to discuss the company’s work with The Daily Wire. According to Illinois corporation filings, Massey is the company’s president, while its secretary is Tariq H. Cheema.
At the same address in Lombard, Illinois, the pair once operated a nonprofit called the World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists. It was a reverse configuration — with Massey as secretary and Cheema as president, according to tax-exempt filings.