Hart said his group had supported Trump’s campaign-trail calls for more efficient government. But now, he said, the #Trump admin was moving in the opposite direction, & wrongly invoking the upcoming celebrations as an “emergency”, to justify bypassing legally required competition [+ oversight & review].
“We’ve known that this is going to be America’s 250th anniversary for 250 years,” Hart said. “It’s not like we didn’t have time to plan.”
John Hart, chief executive of the conservative watchdog group Open the Books, said that the government seemed to be flying blind, embarking on an expensive project without knowing for sure what it would cost or how well it would work.
“The first thing any rational homeowner, family or business does is they solicit competitive bids,” Hart said. “Because when you rely on sole source contracting, it opens the door to extraordinary waste.”
Now that the repair work is underway, other documents indicate that the same #contractor had—at least initially—not been able to perform one of the most critical parts of its repair job: sealing the gaps between the concrete slabs at the pool’s floor.
Water has leaked out of those gaps for decades, creating a costly problem that #Trump has vowed to fix. But the contractor’s attempts to seal those gaps failed in 2 trials earlier this month…
#ReflectingPool Contract Has ‘#Inflated’ #Profit Margin, Government Analysis Finds
Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the Virginia-based contractor, is being paid $13.1 million, which is seven times the amount that #Trump initially said the work would cost.
The firm that was given a no-bid contract to “repair” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, is charging 20%. The typical profit margin is 6% to 12%, internal records show.
#GovernmentWaste #scam #economy
nytimes.com/2026/05/27/us/poli…
Y’all, we need to talk about upcoming #IPOs, and the insane rule changes that #nasdaq has just announced.
Nasdaq rewrote its #index inclusion rules to accommodate #SpaceX’s mega-IPO, implementing a "Fast Entry" provision that allows the company to join the Nasdaq-100 index just 15 trading days after its initial public offering, down from the standard three-month seasoning period.
They also eliminated the minimum float requirement of 20% available public shares and instead stocks with less than 20% of shares publicly traded, Nasdaq applies a 3x multiplier to the free-float for index weighting purposes, artificially inflating low-float giants like SpaceX in passive funds.
Ok, but in English? #SpaceX, #OpenAI and #Anthropic have just figured out a scam to force every passive #IRA, #401k, and index fund to buy their stock before pricing evaluation.
They’ve figured out how to steal your #retirement.
#AI #LLM #Scam #guillotines #YouWillOwnNothing
businessinsider.com/spacex-ipo…
SpaceX's IPO filing has arrived. Elon Musk's rocket company is set to reshape the market when it goes public, with impacts at the index level and beyond.Naomi Buchanan (Business Insider)
