I wrote in July about how Donald Trump, despite rhapsodizing about the virtues of competitive bidding (“it sharpens their game, makes them bid competitively on price, and encourages them to give me the best quality product possible”) doesn’t practice competitive bidding when he plays with somebody else’s money. Trump’s a pro-bid businessman turned no-bid president.
After my article appeared, a chastened White House sent a government-wide memo telling agencies to stop giving out no-bid contracts. Just kidding! The no-bid contracts march on. The nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, estimated the Trump administration spent $265 million on no-bid contracts in 2025. In 2026 POGO projects the number will be closer to $300 million.
The New York Times reported August 1 that Trump paid almost $7 billion to purchase, on a no-bid basis, 11 icebreakers—more than twice as many as the Coast Guard has said it needs. Most of these will be from Finland, per an agreement with its president, Alexander Stubb, hashed out while Trump and Stubb played a round of golf. But to calm any Buy America objections, the Trump administration also contracted with an American company, Bollinger Shipyards in Raceland, Louisiana. That’s a no-bid contract, too. Bollinger’s chief executive, the Times reports, has donated $1.7 million to Republican candidates over the past decade.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported last month that Trump’s sons Donald, Jr., and Eric have invested in more than a dozen companies, mostly since their father’s re-election, that collected more than $3.2 billion from government contracts after the Trump boys climbed aboard. Some of these companies, the Post reported, “have gained coveted spots on shortlists of preapproved contractors that can bid exclusively on up to nearly $200 billion in future work.” Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Robert Garcia, and Tammy Duckworth wrote the Pentagon’s inspector general earlier this week demanding an accounting of which companies are involved and the procedures by which each company secured its contract or contracts.
That brings us to the latest no-bid contract to make headlines: an award of up to $150 million to the Burke Law Group, co-founded by Marcella Burke. During Trump’s first term, Burke was deputy general counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency and then deputy solicitor and senior counselor to the Interior department. She co-founded Burke Law Group three years ago. The firm’s other co-founder, Jeffrey Hall, was confirmed by the Senate last December to be assistant administrator for the office of enforcement and compliance assurance at the Environmental Protection Agency.
At Hall’s confirmation hearing Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island called him a “MAGA zealot” and said the Burke Group was “a firm looking to make a name defending high-profile, attention-grabbing conservative legal cases.” In April, Ilya Shapiro, a senior counsel at the Burke Group, wrote an article for the hard-right website The Daily Wire headlined, “No, Trump Can’t Be Removed Under the 25th Amendment.” In 2024, Burke told the online magazine Man & Culture that the Burke Group is intended to be a haven for lawyers who’ve been terminated based on DEI or ESG and just “want to be lawyers.”
These are the Burke Group’s qualifications to receive a $150 million no-bid job.
The job itself is to represent unaccompanied immigrant children. Depending on which news account you go by, the number of lawyers the Burke Group employs who possess relevant experience is zero, one, or two. The previous grantee, a nonprofit called Acacia Center for Justice, possessed nearly two decades of experience representing unaccompanied immigrant children. Its contract with the Health and Human Services department, or HHS, expired on July 31. “Acacia did not accept a bridge contract from the administration,” Acacia said in an August 4 statement, “because it would have required legal service providers to turn over confidential client information that could be used to deport the very children we are committed to protecting as a condition of payment.”
According to Manuela Silva, who broke this story in the web publication NOTUS, “The federal government had a fraught relationship with Acacia, including attempting to terminate its legal contract last March and withholding funds for months.” HHS stopped payment last November on $65 million in an attempt to stromgarm Acacia and its sub-contractors to furnish the confidential information in question, and in March the immigration lawyers sued to get paid for their work. An earlier NOTUS piece by Jackie Llanos said that HHS lawyers explained in court that the government withheld payment because Acacia failed to provide information necessary to verify that the children they represented were covered under the contract. But the government has never requested this information before, according to Acacia and its sub-contractors.
A separate lawsuit brought by the Jewish Family and Community Servies of Pittsburgh furnishes some context. Its complaint says “unaccompanied children are being detained and removed at approximately three times the prior rate.” It’s worse than that. According to a July report by Pro Publica’s Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen; these children are being detained and removed at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first presidential term, which was hardly pro-immigration. And if you look at data about removal and voluntary departure for immigrant minors in general—accompanied or not—children are being removed at four times the rate during Trump’s first presidential term. That works out to about 10,000 removal or voluntary departure orders per month, according to Pro Publica. The vast majority of these kids, of course, have no criminal history.
I emailed Marcella Burke requesting an interview about the firm’s contract with HHS. I wanted to ask whether her firm will rat out the children it’s assigned to represent. She didn’t reply, but I think I can guess.
