Jack Ewing, reporting for The New York Times:

The department’s procurement forecast for 2025, which details purchases the agency expects to make, includes $400 million for armored Tesla vehicles. The document does not specify which Tesla model, but the electric Cybertruck, which has a body of high-strength stainless steel, would be the most suitable vehicle.

Mr. Musk spent more than $250 million to help elect Mr. Trump, who then appointed him as the leader of a cost-cutting initiative that’s been called the Department of Government Efficiency.

The purchase of Cybertrucks, an atypical choice for government armored transport, is likely to raise conflict of interest issues, especially as Mr. Musk trumpets his own efforts to root out what he regards as unnecessary spending.

“Likely to raise” is doing a lot of work there. There’s just no way this is good clean procurement and everyone knows it. Either Musk should run his businesses and have nothing to do with the government or he should defer from accepting any and all government contracts for his businesses. Even someone trying to do this ethically couldn’t manage it; it’s inherently unethical. It’s being reported that this deal started under the Biden administration, which is worth noting, but even if it did, clearly Musk should recuse Tesla from consideration.

One side is powerless, at the moment, to stop it, and the other side is in the midst of a full-on embrace of partisan corruption as policy. One thing that makes Trump so hard to reckon with is that his graft is right out in the open. He ran a luxury hotel with his fucking name on it two blocks from the White House during his first term, and everyone with business before his administration — like when T-Mobile was trying to get approval for its acquisition of Sprint — knew they were expected to stay there.

Pre-Trump, it was the “catching” of concealed dealmaking and bribery that signaled corruption being rooted out. But you can’t get “caught” doing something that’s right out in the open. We just have to call it what it is: abject corruption.

See also: Jimmy Carter’s 2017 op-ed: “You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President”.

Update: Bobby Allyn at NPR reports:

The State Department said Thursday it is abandoning plans of purchasing $400 million worth of armored Tesla vehicles after a public document detailing federal contracts for fiscal year 2025 gained wide attention.

That expected purchase of Teslas, which was slated for September of this year, is now on hold, according to the State Department, which now says it has no plans of fulfilling the contract.

Well then never mind. No corruption here. It’s all good.