The White Houses Failure in Puerto Rico Was Even Worse Than We Knew

[jmowreader]

34. I think you're absolutely right.

This is her Inside Government page: http://government-contractors.insidegov.com/l/416996/Tribute-Contracting-LLC

I went through her contracts, and her almost exclusive customer is the Department of Justice - a lot of bulk food for prisons, and her biggest contract is mattress covers for a prison. She's running a "middleperson" firm, and most of the little shit the government buys comes from those companies. If Shell wants to sell a million 5-gallon cans of diesel engine oil to the Army at $65 per can (that can would cost you $90 in a store, so $65 is not a bad price) they know the government prefers to let small contracts to small businesses, minority-owned businesses, woman-owned business and African American-owned businesses, so they call someone like Tribute Contracting - which is all four - and tell her, "bid $66 a can and tell the Army you can have it to them the week after the bids are opened; we'll charge you $65 and we'll both make money." Everyone wins: Shell sells five million gallons of oil at a profit, Tribute makes a million bucks and the taxpayer gets enough oil to do an oil change on every ground vehicle the Army has for $24 a can cheaper than letting supply sergeants run down to NAPA with their government credit cards.

The problem here is the government REALLY needs to start looking at a firm's capabilities before it accepts a bid. Our intelligence agencies did that when I was in the business, and it works well: if you need a new 1000-ton air conditioner, you don't go to the people who make nothing but window air conditioners and swamp coolers for 50-foot mobile homes; you go to the three companies that make 1000-ton air conditioners. If anyone else was president, a requirement for 30 million meals would have ended with a phone call to the company that makes T-rats for the Army: "We need two and a half million rations packed into 20-foot ISOtainers, when will they be here?"