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Markwayne Mullin is on track to take over a Department of Homeland Security that appears to have made corrupt contracting, meant to exploit loopholes and reward allies, standard operating procedure. The scandal that became the last straw for Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem — her procurement of a $200 million ad campaign from close associates — is just a part of the picture. Certainly the Trump administration would like to depict the Noem ad campaign as an aberration, and, with her departure, a closed episode. But the drip, drip of new facts from her time atop the agency continues, with a report from NBC Thursday alleging that Corey Lewandowski, an advisor to Noem, was taking a cut from contracts. The ad procurement scandal that brought down Noem, though sensational, is the tip of the iceberg at the department. 

DHS has initiated an enormously costly campaign to build or otherwise procure detention space all over the country, including $38 billion for facilities to store the vast population of migrants Trump intends to seize and to lock up. With commands from on high to put in place this new detention capacity as fast as possible, DHS appears primed to create a broader procurement scandal so bad that it may become the Achilles’ heel of the entire campaign to rapidly seize, detain and mistreat a vast population.

A brief review of Noem’s ad scandal provides a good introduction to how far DHS has strayed from federal contracting norms. Members of Congress centered their attention on how the ad campaign gave contracts to firms that were connected to the secretary, who, in turn, created shamelessly self-promoting ads featuring Noem herself. Let us look at the part that is telling about DHS procurement generally, including for detention facilities. Noem wanted, of course, to select a particular firm to do her ads. Normally, competition rules get in the way: competition rules require choosing the firm that gives lowest cost and best value, which is determined through specific criteria. (Detention firms, for example, are evaluated in part on the human fitness criteria for detention.) 

A major ProPublica article in November, which broke the story on Noem’s ads, suggests that the conflict of interest was obscured by having the Noem-linked firm not be a general........

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