A national AP story talks about the financial challenges faced by small companies that perform sub-contracting duties, known as tiering, especially during disaster relief projects such as Hurricane Katrina. Tiering worries small businesses even when there are no disasters involved, said John Chichester, who heads the Procurement Technical Assistance Center at Wayne State University . The federal government\'s spending on recovery efforts has drawn headlines and Congressional inquiries about outsized contracts, including $2 billion to four companies for debris cleanup in Louisiana and Mississippi. But at the bottom of the contract food chain is an army-for-hire of truckers, backhoe operators and tree-trimmers, most four, five or more tiers removed from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and the agencies\' money. \"The more contractors there are,\" said Ben Ives, a truck owner from Gladstone , Mich. five links down in the chain formed to clean up New Orleans , \"the more hands in the cookie jar.\"