A manager at a Trump Organization golf club in New Jersey traveled to the World of Concrete trade show in January of this year seeking ideas to fix the sometimes leaky and mucky Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

Ultimately a Trump-tapped firm was handed a $6.9 million no-bid contract to get the work done, using an exemption to the awarding of federal contracts reserved for urgent situations, such as the prevention of “serious injury, financial or other, to the government.” 

The urgency? The desire to have the work completed for the July 4, 2026, 250-year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It was, the New York Times reported, “the latest in a string of cases where Mr. Trump’s government invoked special powers to shut down required competition, and then handed contracts directly to the president’s preferred vendors.” The pool, “which was supposed to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital,” the Times wrote.

The story of the pool can also serve as a handy checklist of the arguments against no-bid contracts in general, whether handed out by this administration or another, at the federal level or the state or local levels, and a good opportunity to look at what can go wrong when governments employ no-bid contracting.

The most obvious argument against no-bid contracts is that the public agency has no cost comparisons to ensure that the agency is getting a fair price for the work being done. Was this the best price available to do the repair work for the reflecting pool? We will never know.

Once a company locks into a contract, they don’t need to look over their shoulder that some other company might come along. The lack of competition provides a possible incentive for poor quality work. A federal judge–and Trump appointee at that–has indicated the problem with the Reflecting Pool was the result of “flawed installation by the contractor” and the rush to complete the job, 

No-bid contracts leave governments with no comparable information about how work will be done. Can other vendors do it better, or faster, or more effectively, or with better paid workers? Will one bidder account for something another one doesn’t, and bring up important issues not previously considered? Those questions go unanswered in no-bid work. Had the work on the Reflecting Pool been bid out, it’s possible we would have had a deeper discussion about what the project truly entailed–like, maybe that coating doesn’t play well with the sun, or the filtration system.

No-bid contracting also provides plenty of opportunities for favoritism in awarding contracts–and the Trump administration has granted plenty of such contracts to donors and long-time associates of the president’s private businesses, and even to the organizers of Trump’s January 6 rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. Capitol and its police force.

It can also lead to a further corruption of the process–creating a platform for kickbacks or other pay-to-play schemes that might benefit a person at an agency instead of–or in addition to–whatever the benefit to the public that was intended to be derived through the contract. 

Even beyond the reflecting pool, the Trump administration has been prolific with the use of no-bid contracts. Federal no-bid contracts included Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noel’s funding of a $220 million ad campaign, for which she was eventually fired; eleven polar ice-breaking ships Trump decided to buy after a golf game with Finland’s president; and detention center facilities to keep up with the huge number of individuals rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

It’s important to remember that it’s not just the federal government that has inked no-bid contracts that didn’t end well. 

Investigators found the then-CEO of Chicago Public Schools had received a kickback for awarding a no-bid contract, and a former executive director of a Norfolk, Virginia housing authority was found to have steered no-bid contracts to former colleagues and business associations. PennLive found that the Pennsylvania state legislature used no-bid contracts for a wide range of services but required little in the way of accountability for the work of the contract, essentially creating “slush funds” for both the Republican and Democratic leadership. Former chief White House ethics counsel under George W. Bush said this system was “an invitation to corruption.” An audit of no-bid city contracts in Berkeley, California showed that, even without evidence of corruption or wrongdoing, some of the contracts were simply bad deals for the city. 

In general, no-bid contracts should be used sparingly, probably only in emergency situations where time is truly of the essence. While some have argued that no-bid contracting could also be useful in situations where the work is so specialized that only one firm can perform it, it probably wouldn’t hurt to put out a competitive bid in that scenario just to see what others can offer. 

In any case, pool work, even for a really large pool, most definitely should have been competitively procured. 

Shar Habibi
Research and Policy Director
In the Public Interest