David A. Fahrenthold

And we were always proven wrong.

Fountains always break.

It's not the Bellagio, but it is a pretty big fountain.

There's two fountains.

Each of them has sort of two spray rings, as they call them.

And they don't work.

They haven't worked for a few years.

So the job was to just repair those so the water could start flowing again.

It's not top secret.

It's not particularly hard.

It's something that happens in the government all the time.

But what we found was that the contract was given out on a no-bid basis.

So the government selected a contractor without going through the legally required process of comparing offers and figuring out who could do the best job for the least money.

Right.

When it's your money, that seems obvious, right?

And the reason these laws exist is because the government is not spending its own money.

Spending ours.

Yeah, they have to make sure that the government follows these procedures so that they're getting the same good deal for us, the taxpayers, that we would try to get for ourselves if it was our air conditioner that broke or our plumbing or our fountain or whatever.

Right.

Well, they've cited an exemption that does exist in the law for urgent situations.