(FORTUNE Small Business) – As soon as the rains ended, construction companies began cleaning up--in more ways than one. Few, however, were small businesses. By law, small firms should get 23% of all federal contracts awarded, but in the rush to rebuild, that target has been overlooked.

At presstime, nearly 80% of the $1.8 billion in clean-up contracts awarded by FEMA had been made with little or no bidding. Not surprisingly, large, out-of-state, and politically well-connected construction behemoths dominated. California's Bechtel and Fluor each scored $100 million in no-bid contracts before the floodwaters had even receded. Halliburton cashed in too, nabbing a $500 million contract to repair Gulf Coast Naval facilities.

"The big hogs have been eating all this time," says L&L Dumping owner Lucky Jones Ellis, 55. "Us little hogs need to feed at the trough too." L&L, which owns a modest fleet of Bobcats, dump trucks, and backhoes in Camp Hill, Ala., is too small for FEMA's large contracts, and while Ellis has trawled its large competitors' websites, filled out numerous applications, and dialed the requisite 800 numbers, he has yet to land a subcontract.

Where are those subcontracts going? "To carpetbaggers," says Mitchell Mark, owner of Snee Chemical, a 35-person janitorial supply firm in Harahan, La. Mark says he has a warehouse full of cleaning supplies in Katrina-ravaged Jefferson Parish, but FEMA, big contractors, and even the Red Cross aren't buying much locally. "They're shipping things in from out of state," says Mark. "Exactly how is that supposed to help the local economy?"