David A. Fahrenthold

These are times when there's no time to seek other bids because there's some sort of emergency going on, often in natural disasters or wartime.

They've cited that as a reason not to seek other bids and just go with this bid here.

And the urgency in this case is not a war, obviously, or a natural disaster, but just that the president wants this done by July 4th.

Right.

But remember, the 250th anniversary of the country has been on the calendar for 250 years.

And also, the Trump administration started talking about this and caring about this last spring.

So it's not like this deadline, July 4th, 2026, appeared for the first time out of nowhere in the beginning of this year.

It's something that had been on their calendar from the beginning.

Right now, this contract is worth $17 million.

And what we were able to tell by looking inside the government's contracting records was that the original estimate the government had gotten from this job, it had reached out in the Biden era to an independent estimator to get a sense of how much it ought to cost, was about $3, $4 million.

Wow.

And you could tell by looking in the records that the Trump administration had gone into that and pumped that figure up in a couple of ways that contracting officials told us was odd.

Such as?

Well, they counted inflation twice.

They increased it for inflation and then increased it again for inflation.

I want to count inflation twice.

Right, exactly.

If I'm selling a home, I'm definitely going to do that.

It's not a lot of money in the context of the federal government, but it's really emblematic of something that we have seen all over Washington and in some places all over the federal government, which is that the Trump administration is bypassing the competitive process that is set up in the law to make sure taxpayers get the best deal and handing out contracts without competition, often to companies that have some sort of connection to the president or his administration.

The company that got this contract is called Clark Construction.