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. The pool, the New York Times reported, “is 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.”

Even beyond the reflecting pool, the Trump administration has been prolific with the use of no-bid contracts.

That story is among the many details that, according to a New York Times piece, “show that the 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.”

It 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 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........

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