The Trump administration has a worrying trend of awarding sketchy government contracts

This is an adapted excerpt from the May 5 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”

On Tuesday, Republicans in the Senate took the giant spending bill they are trying to rush through Congress and added a billion dollars to it — $1 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars earmarked specifically to build President Donald Trump’s lavish White House ballroom.

Now, that $1 billion price tag would be eye-popping even if it came out of thin air, but it didn’t. Since Trump announced his plan to destroy the East Wing and build a golden ballroom, the cost of the project has just kept growing, from $200 million to $300 million to $400 million.

First, Trump said he was going to pay for it. Then donors were going to pay for it. But now it’s you, the American taxpayer, who might foot the vast majority of the costs — because congressional Republicans want to add $1 billion in public funding for ballroom security features.

And if the new taxpayer-funded addition to Trump’s ever-ballooning ballroom price tag wasn’t sketchy enough to begin with, that new increase comes just a week after The New York Times got this scoop: “Firm Building Trump’s Ballroom Got a Secret No-Bid Contract for a Nearby Job.”

Last summer, Trump chose a Maryland-based construction company to build his White House ballroom. Then in January, as the Times reported, government documents showed that the Trump administration “secretly gave the company a no-bid contract to do another job at a sharply inflated price.”

The National Park Service wanted to repair two fountains in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. In 2022 the Biden administration estimated the work would cost $3.3 million. But the Trump administration paid $17.4 million.

To arrive at that much higher number, the Trump administration added work like building benches and a kiosk. But it also did things like add more than $1 million to adjust for inflation, twice.

First, the Park Service increased the price by 27% to adjust for inflation. But then it took that number and increased it by an additional 24% to adjust for inflation, again. That is some creative accounting.

Now, by law federal agencies are supposed to seek competitive bids when contracting out work, which means that multiple companies compete to create the best proposal at the lowest cost to win a government contract like this one.

That is how this process is supposed to work. But that is not how the process worked here.

In this case, the Trump administration just so happened to give an inflated contract to the same construction company that is building the president’s ballroom, without considering offers from any other firms.

The administration cited a rarely used “urgency” exception to avoid the bidding process, an exception that is usually meant for emergencies, such as war or natural disasters. But in this case, a spokesperson for the Interior Department told the Times that the “urgency” was “to ensure this project is done well ahead of America’s 250th anniversary.” She added that the way the “contract was awarded was above board.”

The construction company itself did not respond to specific questions about the ballroom or fountain projects, but it told the Times that its “track record reflects the quality of their work and their commitment to integrity.”

Now, on its own, that $17.4 million no-bid contract is suspicious, to say the least, but of course that no-bid contract is not a one-off.

Two months ago, the Times reported on a whole slew of no-bid contracts from the Trump administration that just so happened to funnel $13 million worth of work to the firm that planned the president’s rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021.

The White House told the Times that it was not involved in the awarding of any of those contracts. And the agencies that did award the contracts, the Treasury and the Navy, both justified the lack of a bidding process by saying the projects were on “condensed timelines” and said that the firm that planned Trump’s Jan. 6 rally was simply the only vendor capable of completing the job on time.

And now, even with that incredibly recent history of the Trump administration handing out incredibly sketchy government contracts, Republicans want to earmark $1 billion of your tax dollars for Trump’s ballroom, which he might just use as a giant slush fund.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Democrats might be able to do something about it.

For 18 months now, Democrats have responded to stories about potential Trump grifts with lists of demands laid out in strongly worded letters, but they haven’t actually had the power to force the Trump administration to comply with any of those demands.

But the midterms could change that — and the White House knows it.

On  Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that White House lawyers have begun to prep staff to deal with a Democratic Congress.

White House staffers are reportedly being shown PowerPoint presentations about how congressional oversight works, with the implication that that very oversight might soon be coming for them.

Allison Detzel contributed.

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