As the Department of Homeland Security rushed to purchase a small fleet of jets last fall to use in deportation flights, government officials dispensed with the usual bidding process and instead used a no-bid contract to pay $464 million to a company in Virginia for 10 aircraft. According to a report in The New York Times Thursday, those jets have gone largely unused, sitting on the ground at airports for months at a time.
Seven of the planes are Boeing 737s, passenger jets that can seat about 200 people and are suitable for mass deportation flights. But the planes have spent most of their time parked at a small airport in Lake Charles, Louisiana. DHS reportedly does not have enough staff to operate them.
The other three planes are luxury business jets: two Gulfstream G650s and a Boeing 737-8 MAX; the latter is equipped with flat-screen televisions, a bar, a kitchen, showers and a queen-sized bed. Soon after acquiring the jets, DHS sought to loan or lease them to other government agencies for use by senior officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, White House Border Czar Tom Homan, and possibly members of President Trump’s family.
Urgent business: Federal acquisitions generally require the use of competitive contracts, but that requirement can be waived when delaying the purchasing process would result in “serious injury, financial or other,” to the government. DHS would not reveal the injury it was seeking to avoid when it purchased the jets with a no-bid contract, citing national security concerns.
The Times notes that while waivers have typically been granted in times of war or natural disaster, under the Trump administration, the use of no-bid contracts for urgent business has become far more common. DHS has entered into roughly 500 no-bid contracts, covering more than $29 billion in spending, during President Trump’s second term. According to a Times analysis, nearly two-thirds of the contracts signed by DHS have been “urgent” since Trump reentered the White House. In 2024, urgent contracts made up less than 1% of DHS contracts.
The plane contract is typical of the second Trump administration in another way, too, the Times says: It involves people connected to Trump or his Cabinet secretaries. The chairman of the company that sold the planes to DHS, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, once made political donations to Kristi Noem, the former governor of South Dakota who served as DHS secretary until March of this year.
Lawmakers want answers: Democratic Sens. Patty Murray and Christopher Murphy sent a letter this week to the DHS inspector general, inquiring about the purchase of the jets, as well as plans to use some of the aircraft “to ferry Trump administration officials around.”
The lawmakers said the plan to use the jets to fly Trump administration officials around the globe “demonstrates a remarkable disregard for American taxpayers who work hard and expect government officials to responsibly manage their tax dollars, not burn them on extravagant luxury jets.” The senators added that the acquisition of the jets raises “serious legal concerns, as Congress has not provided the necessary legal authorization for DHS to purchase these planes, much less run a private jet service for government executives.”
Murray and Murphy noted that Republicans provided DHS with “a remarkable windfall totaling over a quarter of a trillion dollars” through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer and another more recent funding bill. “But instead of using the staggering amount of funding provided to DHS to actually improve the lives of Americans by requiring basic compliance with the Fourth Amendment, acquiring and deploying body-worn cameras to every law enforcement officer in the field, mandating minimum officer identification, or properly training new hires, this administration has lit taxpayer dollars on fire by acquiring new and unnecessary planes to jet Trump officials around in extreme luxury that the vast majority of Americans will never experience,” the senators said.
The senators requested detailed information about the purchase of the jets, including contract specs, flight logs, lease details and plans for use, with a deadline of August 26, 2026.