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.

As it happens, they weren’t the only expensive items DHS bought and failed to use. The New York Times reported:

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 planes are luxury business jets, while the other seven are older Boeing 737 passenger jets.

The Times’ report added that the no-bid contract to purchase the planes went to a company, Daedalus Aviation, the chairman of which donated to a political committee aligned with Noem.

DHS made no effort to deny the accuracy of the reporting. On the contrary, in a written statement, the department appeared to throw the former secretary, whom Donald Trump ousted in March, under the bus.

“The contract for Daedalus was made and approved by department leadership before [incumbent Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin] was sworn in,” the statement read. A Noem spokesperson, meanwhile, said the contract was finalized under Mullin.

While the blame game is notable in its own right, two key Democratic senators — Patty Murray of Washington, the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the ranking member on the Homeland Security Subcommittee — also demanded answers this week in a letter to Mullin.

“The American people deserve a full accounting of this gross misuse of their tax dollars,” the senators wrote, raising related concerns about whether other members of the president’s team used the DHS planes as “an in-house private jet service for Trump administration officials.”

To that end, Murray and Murphy, according to their letter to the Cabinet secretary, want:

• Contract details for the purchase of each plane;
• Contracts for any and all retrofitting and missionization of each plane;
• Cost analysis for the operations and maintenance of each plane for the life cycle of the plane;
• Flight logs to date, including the names and titles of passengers, origination, destination and purpose of travel;
• A copy of the lease agreement with the FBI for the G650 jet;
• A copy of the loan agreement with the Defense Department for the Boeing 737-8 MAX business jet; and
• The legal justifications for the purchase, operation and maintenance, as well as planned uses, of these aircraft.

The Senate Democrats asked Mullin to provide these materials by Aug. 26. Watch this space.

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