Two top congressional Democrats on foreign policy matters pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday about a now-cancelled effort to purchase $400 million worth of armored electric vehicles made by Tesla.
In a letter citing NPR's recent reporting on the Trump administration's move to acquire $400 million of Teslas, U.S. Reps. Gregory Meeks of New York, the ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, and Jared Moskowitz of Florida, who's the top Democrat on the committee's oversight subcommittee, said the plans represent "a serious violation of federal procurement laws" that would "unlawfully enrich Mr. Musk," the billionaire tech mogul serving as a top official in the White House.
Earlier this week, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut also wrote Rubio a letter demanding details about plans to purchase Teslas.
To Musk's critics, the apparent plan for the State Department to buy hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of armored Teslas, presumably the company's Cybertruck model, fueled concerns that the billionaire could use his position in the White House to self-deal and boost his business empire.
Last month, a State Department spokesperson told NPR the $400 million figure was "an estimate," and that there are now no plans of moving forward with the purchase. The spokesperson said a plan to begin studying the viability of using Teslas as armored vehicles first started in the Biden administration.
A document from the Biden White House obtained by NPR shows that the State Department planned to spend $483,000 on electric vehicle acquisition in 2025, less than 1% of the $400 million estimated expenditure that first showed up in a spreadsheet of expected State Department contracts. When reports first circulated of the spreadsheet item, a State official edited the document to say the award was for "armored electric vehicles," not "armored Tesla," which the lawmakers homed in on in their letter to Rubio on Friday.
"This raises serious questions about whether the Department not only scrubbed the document to remove any references to Tesla but also may have backdated the publicly available documentation to give the false impression that every element of these procurement plans – including the $400 million value – originated in the prior Administration," wrote the Democratic congressmen.
The State Department and Musk did not return requests for comment.
The lawmakers ask Rubio if State Department officials intentionally changed the electric vehicle purchase amount from $483,000 to $400 million, who oversaw the change and for proof that the contract has been "definitively abandoned."
While the Biden administration document obtained by NPR appears to show the push for the government to buy $400 million of Teslas started under Trump, who exactly put the item in the spreadsheet, and at whose direction, remains unclear.
Have information you want to share about the ongoing changes across the federal government? Bobby Allyn is available via the encrypted messaging app Signal at ballyn.77
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