More No-Bid Contracts from the Trump Administration

In April, we posted about the Trump Administration’s no-bid contracts with an event-planning company, Event Strategies. During my summer hiatus from regular blogging, there was more news about Event Strategies. As David A. Fahrenthold and Andrea Fuller reported in The New York Times, that company was hired by Freedom 250, to organize the “Great American State Fair,” the July 4th celebration that nobody attended. The Times reporters could not get information about how much Event Strategies was paid because the funding was funneled through “an opaque nonprofit.”

Whatever the no-bid contract price, Event Strategies was clearly worth it. The reviews (gleaned from Wikipedia) speak for themselves:

• The Washington Post reported opening day attendance was “relatively sparse compared with past National Mall events.”
• According to Fox News, only a few hundred people could be seen, but a reporter claimed there were many more people somewhere else.
• Power outages led to Ferris wheel malfunctions and caused booths to close due to lack of air conditioning.
• Multiple artists were slated to perform at an opening festival, but pulled out due to the event’s association with Trump’s political Freedom 250 organization.
• A video containing the Confederate Flag was shown at the North Carolina exhibit, causing controversy.
• On July 4, the fair was evacuated due to storms, and 11 people were sent to the hospital as a result of heat exhaustion.
• Beginning at midnight on July 5, approximately 850,000 fireworks were launched over a span of 40 minutes from various sites in Washington, D.C. . . . The city also briefly recorded the worst air quality of any major city in the world due to smog caused by the fireworks.

Well, perhaps I wouldn’t include that information in the print ads.

We posted again on no-bid contracts in May, this time in connection with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The assessment by U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro (below) of the quality of work done by that contractor speaks volumes regarding the dangers of no-bid contracts. In her motion to dismiss the indictment of David Hearn for vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, Ms. Pirro conceded that damage to the Reflecting Pool “was the result of flawed installation by the [no-bid] contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings and the rush to complete the project. . . .” The damage to the Reflecting Pool, she continued, “was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

Surely the Trump Administration has now learned its lesson and recognizes the dangers of no-bid contracts. Not so much.

This week, Christopher Flavelle, Andrea Fuller, and Nicholas Nehamas report in The New York Times that the Trump Administration has entered into no-bid contracts for the construction of eleven polar icebreakers. As is often the case, the Trump Administration is responding to a real need. The U.S. currently has fewer such ships than we need. But according to The Times’ reporting, the clear consensus is that we don’t need eleven, and we don’t need to have them built on an expedited basis through no-bid contracts. It’s especially nice to see Russell Vought, the man who designed the plan to remove statutory job protections from most federal workers, signing off on $6.8 billion in no-bid contracts to build ships that we do not need. And in a signature America First move, it appears that most of the shipbuilding is going to be done abroad. The U.S.-based companies that were awarded contracts have never completed an icebreaker before.

The reporting in The Times makes much of the fact that Finland’s President is a skilled golfer who played with the U.S. President in a tournament. Our President claims that they won the tournament, and they may have done, but he claims to have won a lot of things. In any case, the reporting suggests that success on the golf course helped smooth the way for a shipbuilding partnership, but it also points to the extraordinary arbitrariness in the President’s decision-making processes. If Finland’s President did not play golf, would he have gotten the opportunity to persuade the President that icebreakers are a national-security priority? World leaders should take note. Enduring post-war security and trade partnerships are one thing, but a reliable short game may be what it takes to stay on course with the President.