Trump's no-bid contract spree is worse than anyone thought —and it's just the beginning
20 July
An exhibit of former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft Museum in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 17, 2026. REUTERS/Al Drago
President Donald Trump’s no-bid contract spree is turning Washington into a pay-to-play playground, and taxpayers are the ones getting stuck with the bill.
According to the New Republic's Timothy Noah, there's everything from secret sweetheart deals to wildly inflated project costs, and the administration’s contracting habits are now drawing serious ethical concerns and watchdog outrage.
Writing on Monday, Noah recalled one of Trump's books, ghostwritten by Breitbart News contributors, the builder claimed, "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."
That's not happening now that he's in the White House and spending taxpayer dollars on his projects.
"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," Noah explained. "Competitive bids help overcome moral hazard by making the contracting process more objective and transparent."
One estimate he cited claimed that 97 percent of government contracts are "open bid," meaning any company, anywhere, can submit a proposal to handle the project. They compete with others and the government decides on the right bid.
In Trump's case, there's no bidding. In some cases, companies that Trump's administration has approved are simply handed the contract and paid significantly higher sums for the project. In the 3 percent of cases in which that's happened before, it's typically because "extremely rare expertise ... required," the report said.
Noah thinks that, unlike in Trump's personal business, he "lacks the necessary patience," perhaps because he has a four-year span of time that he can conduct the projects he wants.
"But mostly," Noah continued, "it’s because he lacks the necessary honesty. The man never met a moral hazard he didn’t like."
Washington has turned into a massive construction zone. At a time when jobs are being cut across the area and the post-pandemic realization that people can work from home, the D.C. economy shrank by 8.3 percent, the Washington Post reported. Yet, construction projects are exploding. Noah said that under all of those projects lies a no-bid contract.
The most famous example broadcast over the past several months is the company hired to "fix" the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.
"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," cited Noah.
There's another no-bid contract that was given to Barnard Construction Company to build 112.5 miles of a “secondary” border wall in New Mexico. So, behind the first wall Trump built, he's building another wall.
Then there are the migrant facilities. One no-bid contract went to Core Civic, a company that took over the shuttered Leavenworth, Kansas, prison to turn it into a facility to house immigrants the administration seeks to deport. They get $4.2 million per month for the project. It was ultimately replaced with a $60 million annual contract, which is nearly $10 million more than what they were paying monthly, reported the Kansas Reflector and the Lawrence Times.
Then there was the $220 million no-bid contract former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem paid to craft a public relations operation that filmed her on a horse, in a cowboy hat, wearing chaps and talking about immigration. The company was run by her husband, a ProPublic report found.
Most of these companies are in some way connected to Trump or to his administration. Either they're political donors, longtime friends, Mar-a-Lago members or MAGA loyalists.
This barely scratches the surface of the laundry list of no-bid contracts in Noah's collection that the administration is paying out. Democrats in Congress are already looking into the Reflecting Pool disaster, but if they officially take back the House and Senate in November, there will likely be even deeper examinations into how the bids were decided and their connections to the administration across the whole of the federal government.