Buddy, they waste immense, radical amounts of money on stupid shit. The whole contractor system is a leaking sieve full of money. now, you're right that it's not any direct agency- If I had to guess, he's probably downstream of 2-3 subcontractors.
Company 1 is respectable, a known quantity who issues a subcon to company 2 for "domestic intelligence services in support of the ongoing war on terrorism", who gives a chunk of that money to a fly-by-night mushroom company who sees the potential for building an ad-hoc network of dormant "extremists" they can maneuver as they please for whomever wants them.
I've heard it's a hot commodity (or was) in the post trump election era: the system was somewhat blindsided by that surprised swell of internet activism, and they've tried to fix their blindspots in the standard government way: Pay someone to tell you they'll solve it, but don't make sure they understand what they're doing. So, you have dumb old internet-unaware nerds like goldman that end up talking a big game about how they fit in, or they "totally get the internet" only to act even dumber than the garden variety autist.