When I build a building, I let various builders and architects compete for the contract. Why? Because it sharpens their game, makes them bid competitively on price, and encourages them to give me the best quality product possible.
—Donald Trump, Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, 2011
As a real estate developer, Donald Trump would routinely put contracts out to bid to get the highest possible quality at the lowest possible price. This is, of course, a common practice in business. You send out a request for proposal, contractors submit bids, then you choose whichever bid looks most attractive.
Alas, Trump’s next step was often to ignore contractor invoices, leaving these poor saps no way to recover their costs except by filing an expensive lawsuit. Roy Cohn taught Trump that rich-jerk bullying technique. In 2016, USA Today identified at least 60 such contractor lawsuits, including a few brought by the same law firms Trump had earlier hired to fend off stiffed painters, stiffed carpet companies, stiffed real estate brokers, et cetera. Trump’s attitude was that his contractors should work free of charge. “Do you know how much publicity these people get for having me as a client?” Trump would say, according to Maggie Haberman’s 2022 Trump biography, Confidence Man.
The president’s past abuse of contractors does not discredit his past preference for competitive bidding. It’s a sound, sensible way to get value for your money. If you’re a homeowner, you’ve probably done some version of it yourself before undertaking some pricey renovation like replacing a roof or furnace.
Competitive bidding is even more common in government. That’s because when the money to buy goods or services doesn’t come out of the buyer’s pocket, it creates what economists call moral hazard. Competitive bids help overcome moral hazard by making the contracting process more objective and transparent. By one estimate, 97 percent of government contracts are put out to open bid. On those rare occasions when exceptions are made, it’s usually because either speed is of the essence or some extremely rare expertise is required.
Regrettably, to about the same degree Trump favored competitive bidding as a real estate tycoon, he disfavors it as president of the United States. That’s partly because Trump lacks the necessary patience, but mostly it’s because he lacks the necessary honesty. The man never met a moral hazard he didn’t like. Donald Trump will be remembered as (among other things) America’s No-Bid President.
Look under any rock in Washington these days, and you’ll find a no-bid contract. The Interior Department awarded one $1.7 million no-bid contract to Green Water Solutions to clean up the water in the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall and a second $14.7 million no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings to attach blue waterproofing to the Reflecting Pool’s concrete bottom. Customs and Border Protection awarded a $1.6 billion no-bid contract to Barnard Construction Company to build 112.5 miles of “secondary” border wall in New Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded a $4.2 million-per-month no-bid contract to Core Civic to detain immigrants at its shuttered prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, then later replaced that with a $60 million annual contract, according to the Kansas Reflector and the Lawrence Times. The Homeland Security Department awarded $220 million in no-bid contracts for a public relations campaign.
To build an East Wing ballroom, the White House awarded a $500 million no-bid contract to Clark Construction, which in turn awarded subcontractors 11 no-bid contracts for demolition, excavation, fencing, and other services, according to Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell in The Washington Post. The National Park Service awarded Clark Construction a second no-bid 17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park, according to David Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater, and Andrea Fuller of The New York Times.
The Navy and the Treasury Department awarded five contracts worth $13 million to Event Strategies, a public relations firm, to organize celebrations of the Navy’s 250th anniversary and publicize the administration’s “Trump accounts” for children, according to Fahrenthold and Fuller.
Trump tried to add his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, only to be foiled by a federal judge. Right now, a better name might be the Donald J. Trump Center for No-Bid Contracts. The Kennedy Center, of which Trump became board chairman after he fired the previous board and replaced it with loyalists, declared itself in November to be exempt from the Federal Acquisition Regulation that governs federal contracting. The regulation stipulates that “contracting officers shall promote and provide for full and open competition in soliciting offers and awarding Government contracts.” Ditching it was handy because the Trump regime had already started awarding no-bid contracts.
According to a July 13 Washington Post report by Jonathan Edwards, and some whistleblower disclosures that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, published with supporting documents, the Kennedy Center awarded an $8 million no-bid contract to Low Country Flooring to replace and maintain wood floors and a $4.4 no-bid contract to Washington Office Interiors, which in turn subcontracted to Cypress Painting Systems to paint the exterior’s gold columns white, to sand and repaint a reflecting pool on the Kennedy Center’s east plaza, and to retile the bathroom floors and gild the ceilings of the Kennedy Center’s presidential boxes.
It shouldn’t surprise you that many of these no-bid dollars end up inside the capacious pockets of Trump donors and cronies. Green Water Solutions, the Reflecting Pool contractor, is owned by a trust led by John J. Cafaro, a Palm Beach neighbor of Trump’s who (per Fahrenthold) has given more than $300,000 to political committees connected to Trump. Cafaro is a two-time felon. In 2001, Cafaro pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe the outrageously crooked Representative James Traficant, Democrat of Ohio. He paid a $15,000 fine but avoided jail time by testifying against Traficant. In 2010, Cafaro pleaded guilty to violating campaign law by not reporting a $10,000 illegal campaign contribution to his daughter’s unsuccessful 2004 congressional bid.
Some of Homeland Security’s $220 million P.R. spending spree found its way to a consulting firm with what Pro Publica called “longstanding personal and business ties” to then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Trump fired Noem after she said at a congressional hearing that Trump approved the expenditure.
Event Strategies, the P.R. firm hired by the Navy and Treasury, is closely tied to Trump, having collected more than $67 million over the years from political committees connected to him, per Fahrenthold and Fuller. On January 6, 2021, Event Strategies organized the fateful Ellipse rally at which Trump urged supporters to march on the Capitol (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”).
The owner of Barnard Construction, which is building that border fence in New Mexico, contributed more than $1 million to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. CoreCivic, which owns Leavenworth, gave $500,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee.
The poor-quality work products that Trump’s no-bid contracts tend to produce speak for themselves. Here is what the Reflecting Pool looks like today. Here is a sampling from DHS’s no-bid public relations campaign (more a commercial for Noem than for immigration control).
The White House ballroom that Clark Construction was hired to build may, for all we know, end up being constructed perfectly—but nobody except Trump wants even a perfectly crafted ballroom because it will be so big that the executive mansion will end up looking like a dollhouse. Cypress Painting Systems’s work on the Kennedy Center reflecting pool, meanwhile, is not encouraging. The pool is rusting, according to Whitehouse’s whistleblower, along with Cypress Painting Systems’s whitewashed Kennedy Center columns.* We already know that the Kennedy Center’s presidential boxes will be vulgarized because we’re all well acquainted with the president’s bordello baroque aesthetic. The most poignant of Trump’s delusions is that he possesses good taste.
The semiquincentennial celebration, which thus far has been a fiasco, is a no-bid affair. Before Trump’s first presidential term, Congress created a Semiquincentennial Commission, which in turn created a nonprofit called America 250. But as Toni Aguilar Rosenthal of the Revolving Door Project and Alan Zibel of Public Citizen pointed out last month, after Trump tried and failed to gain control over the nonpartisan America 250, he created a MAGA-friendly alternative nonprofit called Freedom 250 that took charge of $103 million in no-bid federal grants, representing about 80 percent of all federal funds allocated for the semiquincentennial since October. This included about $68 million awarded by the Interior Department to Freedom 250’s parent, the congressionally chartered National Park Foundation, plus another $10 million transferred from America 250 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a government agency of which I was previously unaware. More than $7 million in grants (here, here, here, and here) went to the January 6 impresarios Event Strategies. When Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose agency is on record authorizing most of these grants, was asked to account for Freedom 250’s finances, he said it was run out of the White House.
The most conspicuous Freedom 250 failure was the Great American State Fair, which took over the National Mall from June 25 through July 10. It too was a no-bid production. I didn’t go, but it doesn’t appear to have been much fun. “There wasn’t any line to get in,” TNR’s Malcolm Ferguson reported on June 29. (I observed the same one week later.) Ferguson witnessed a child rolling in the grass, crying and screaming, “I. WANT. TO. GO. HOME!!!” In The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott wrote that “everything is stuffed into a fake agora with Doric columns and arched niches painted onto cheap theatrical flats, which look like someone scaled up the photo murals found in a tatty Greek diner that sells gyros, moussaka and heart-bomb platters of pastitsio.”
On July 4, Trump gave a speech at the fair that didn’t start until 11 p.m. because of heavy rain (which at least brought relief from summer temperatures so high that weekend that visitors were twice sent home). The fireworks Washingtonians typically enjoy on July Fourth didn’t start until it was July 5. After the show, the District of Columbia government issued a Code Red declaring outdoor air quality to be “unhealthy for seniors, kids, people with medical conditions.”
Naturally, competitive bidding wouldn’t have moderated the July Fourth weekend weather. But it might have prevented the National Mall from looking that week, from the outside anyway, like Manzanar. As it was, you had to be a hard-core Trump supporter to even want to go. On top of everything else, having a No-Bid President is No Fun.
* This article originally misidentified the name of the contractor responsible for the work on the Kennedy Center and the Reflecting Pool.
