All of the shenanigans and outright corruption of the late, unlamented Biden administration are still coming to light, and likely will be for years to come. It was one of the most deeply and fundamentally corrupt administrations in American history; the Biden family pulled off stunts that would make Hillary Clinton flinch.
In the latest, we learned on Thursday that the Biden administration skipped federal rules to issue a half-billion-dollar grant to a former Biden crony.
A new inspector general's report released Thursday morning accuses the former Biden administration of bypassing federal rules when issuing a more than half-a-billion dollar "sole source contract" to a nonprofit led by a former Biden official to deal with the unaccompanied minor crisis in 2021.
The Administration of Children and Families (ACF), which is under HHS and manages unaccompanied minors, awarded $529 million for a one-year contract in March 2021 to a nonprofit called Family Endeavors Inc. to help establish and manage a new emergency intake site in Texas (EIS) with 2,000 extra beds. However, according to the OIG's new report, Biden's ACF failed to follow federal procurement requirements for full and open competition due to their own "insufficient planning," rather than the COVID-induced emergency the Biden administration cited.
Because it was graft, maybe? The federal government, with all these fuzzy grants to non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), seems all too often to be Graft City. This case, though, is really beyond the pale.
Here's the onion:
The contract beginning March 2021 was "by far the largest ever" for Endeavors Family Inc., and came months after the company hired Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, who served as an advisor to the Biden-Harris transition team. The contract was also the second largest ever awarded by the agency, according to Axios.
But wait! There's more!
Furthermore, the inspector general's report found that the contract price was more than double the agency's own cost estimate of $244 million, and indicated that the agency "subsequently modified" the award 15 times, extending the period until May 2022 and increasing the value to more than three times the original estimate from ACF.
What possible reason could there be to name a contract price more than double the agency's cost estimate?
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Who in the world signed off on this?
This is the kind of thing we see all too often out of Washington. It's not unique to us, either; other countries around the world suffer from the same sort of corruption, many of them far worse than here. This has gone on throughout history; Rome, ancient Greece, and even before that.
But that's no reason to put up with it. Fortunately for us taxpayers, there's a new sheriff in town.
A HHS spokesperson said that under President Donald Trump the ACF is implementing stricter accountability measures and strengthening oversight.
"The previous administration wasted more than $1.8 billion on a facility intended to house illegal aliens that was not even used in the last year of the previous administration, and that kind of fiscal mismanagement is exactly what Secretary Kennedy is working to correct," the spokesperson said. "In fact, this contract was canceled in the early months of the Trump administration as soon as this mismanagement was discovered. HHS and ORR remain fully committed to protecting children, restoring accountability at every level of the system, and putting Americans first."
Good. At least the bleeding has stopped. Now, what are we doing about fixing the system? It's unconscionable, how much all this has to be costing us, the taxpayers. Maybe if a few of the recipients of this ill-gotten wealth did a few years looking at prison bars from the wrong side, it might serve to discourage the others.
Editor’s Note: Help us continue to report the truth about corrupt politicians like pretty much everyone in the Biden administration.
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