During her troubled tenure as the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem prioritized the purchase of warehouses, which she intended to use to detain and effectively imprison undocumented immigrants. That plan did not go well: In June, a few months after Noem’s departure, the Department of Homeland Security decided to abandon seven of the warehouses, which were vacant.

By all appearances, the incident pointed to an important example of the Department of Homeland Security misusing public resources — which looked even worse two months later when the public learned that the agency also spent nearly a half-billion dollars on a no-bid contract for several used airplanes that went largely unused. The no-bid contract went to a company whose chairman donated to a political committee aligned with Noem.

Late last week, this ugly pattern got messier still when we learned about the story of the Prairie Correctional Facility in Minnesota.

Last year, a private prison company called CoreCivic reached out to the Minnesota Department of Corrections with an offer: The state could buy the long-shuttered detention facility for $75 million.

Officials in Minnesota declined, concluding it did not need and could not afford the prison, although things apparently worked out quite well for CoreCivic anyway. The New York Times reported:

Last summer, to their astonishment, the 1,600-bed prison sold for more than $495 million. The buyer: the Department of Homeland Security.

“The price tag is so different than the conversations we were having last year,” said Safia Khan, the deputy commissioner and chief of staff for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. “It was a shock.”

The Times’ report added that CoreCivic, which received nearly seven times the amount of money it had sought from the state of Minnesota a year earlier, “donated $500,000 to President Trump’s inauguration committee” after the Republican’s 2024 victory.

Minnesota’s Democratic attorney general, Keith Ellison, said in a statement, “Trump scamming taxpayers out of almost half a billion dollars is outrageous, especially at a time when Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran are already raising prices for Minnesotans.” (Neither the White House nor DHS commented in response to the Times’ request.)

In theory, this seems like the sort of thing the Republican administration should take quite seriously. After all, Team Trump loves to talk about the suspected misuse of public funds in Minnesota, right?

And yet, on Friday, amid local reporting on the Prairie Correctional Facility story, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was there to talk about the Trump administration’s faltering efforts to root out fraud. A reporter asked about the apparent DHS overpayment, and Bessent did not seem to appreciate the question.

“I don’t know anything about that,” the treasury secretary replied, adding that he considered the question “a waste of our time.”

Oh, I see. By the Republican administration’s own estimate, Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future fraud controversy cost taxpayers roughly $250 million, and the White House considers that one of the most significant scandals of the 21st century. But if the Department of Homeland Security overpaid $420 million for an unused prison in the same state, the only thing that’s wasting is the secretary’s precious time.

A cynic might wonder if Team Trump only cares about alleged waste and fraud when it thinks it can be used as a political cudgel against blue states and racial minorities.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post DHS overpays for private prison, making a mockery of Team Trump’s rhetoric about ‘waste’ appeared first on MS NOW.

Author: Source Author

From MS Now.