The party of fiscal discipline

The centerpiece legislation of Trump’s second term entailed savage cuts to healthcare and food assistance to pay for a fraction of upper-class tax cuts and a massive cash infusion for Homeland Security. Here’s where the money that could have been used to provide critical help for people is going:

Starting last fall, the Department of Homeland Security spent $464 million on a no-bid contract to buy 10 used airplanes from a firm in Northern Virginia.

That was an enormous price tag, but the department said it had no time to consider other offers. The planes were needed urgently for deportation flights.

But since then, the department has barely used this new fleet — for deportations, or anything else.

Three of the aircraft are luxury business jets. Just months after acquiring them, the department sought to loan or lease two to other agencies, including one for the use of F.B.I. director Kash Patel, according to a letter to the department sent Wednesday by top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The other seven are older Boeing 737 passenger jets, which the government has left parked at an airport in Lake Charles, La., for months at a time. An internal government document, obtained by The New York Times, said the agency did not have the staff necessary to operate them.

The acquisitions were part of a surge of rushed contracts handed out recently by the Homeland Security Department, which has repeatedly used the need for “urgency” to bypass regular contracting procedures. The idled planes highlight the risks of that approach. The agency rushed headlong to spend nearly half a billion dollars, only to end up with planes it did not fly.

The contract also illuminated a broader trend within the second Trump administration: no-bid contracts awarded to people with connections to Mr. Trump or his cabinet secretaries. The company that received this contract, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, is led by a chairman who had donated to a political committee supporting the previous Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem.

Buying planes the government doesn’t need to allow donors to drown their beaks is a model of MAGA governance. I can’t wait for the next round of “is JD Vance going to make the Republican Party into the party of economic populism” no-think pieces.