Politicians are pressing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to answer questions about a government contract for armored Teslas that never existed. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-NY) and Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-NY) both sent letters to Rubio last week with a detailed list of questions they want the Secretary to answer.
The letters concern a Biden-era State Department contract for armored Teslas that, if fulfilled, would have enriched the Elon Musk-owned company to the tune of $400 million. “The decision to consider purchasing Tesla vehicles for this purpose highlights the obvious conflicts of interest inherent in Mr. Musk’s dual roles as the Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, Inc. and the practical head of the Department of Government Efficiency,” Blumenthals’s letter said.
Blumenthal is a member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the chairman of its Investigations subcommittee. His letter is dated March 3 and he’s demanding answers from Rubio by today.
Meeks is a ranking member of the House’s Committee on Foreign Affairs. He sent his letter on March 7 and is demanding his answers no later than March 14. “We write to you to request answers and documentation to respond to a series of media reports that the Department of State and Elon Musk intended to engage in unlawful procurement activities that would constitute a serious violation of federal procurement laws, and in doing so planned to unlawfully enrich Mr. Musk,” Meeks said in his letter.
The saga of the armored Teslas began last month when Drop Site News uncovered a line item in a procurement forecast that called for spending $400 million on armoring Teslas. This document is not a budget, it’s a forecast put together by State that talks about money they might spend in the future.
When D.C. decides to spend money, it can take a long time. First, it puts out a Request for Information (RFI), a signal to contractors about what it wants. Then, it looks through the RFIs and, after a lengthy decision-making process, decides whether to spend the money. There’s a 2024 RFI about armoring electric vehicles here.
When I talked to the State Department about this story, they told me that the use of the word “Tesla” had been a clerical error and said that it was a Biden-era initiative that wasn’t moving forward. They’d put out the RFI, they said, and only got one response back.
Someone at State also went back to the original procurement document and changed the word “Tesla” to “electric vehicle.” In the journalism business, we call this a “stealth edit,” and it tends to make you look guilty.
The armored Teslas saga continued to blow up. At the end of February, NPR reported that it had documents that undercut State’s denials. NPR didn’t share these documents or directly quote them. According to its reporting, Biden’s State Department planned to spend about $483,000 in 2025 buying “light-duty EVs.” $483,000 is not $400 million. It is considerably less than that. NPR also didn’t say that the electric vehicles referenced in the documents would be Teslas.
Blumenthal’s letter to Rubio assumes that State is buying Teslas, though, and that it’s going all in on Cybertrucks. “This concern was exacerbated by the fact that the vehicle in question was a Tesla Cybertruck, a failed experiment of a car which has been subject to numerous recalls since its announcement, and would not reasonably be considered for this purpose absent a heavy thumb on the scale,” Blumenthal said.
NPR’s story featured several experts who have conflicting opinions about the viability of up-armored Cybertrucks as State Department vehicles. Some say it’s the perfect vehicle, others say it would be terrible. But, as best I can tell, no contract for the purchase of Cybertrucks exists or has ever existed. NPR doesn’t claim that the State Department plans to spend money on Cybertrucks, just that it could.
I spent the morning crawling through the public database of government contracts. The State Department has spent the last few years buying electric vehicles. Some of them are Teslas. The total cost of the Teslas marked as “light duty” by State in 2024 is around $500,000. Most of the individual contracts are for Model Ys and will be used in South East Asia.
Blumenthal’s letter spends a lot of time decrying State’s use of Cybertrucks, something that was probably never planned. Meeks, however, spends more time on what I think is the real scandal here: stealth editing the forecast document.
“Screenshots published by NPR in its February 24 reporting showed that in the two weeks since Drop Site first published news of the procurement of Armored Tesla vehicles, the Department had quietly edited the procurement forecast documents to remove any specific mention of Tesla but did not immediately remove the project itself,” Meeks said. “This suggests the Department may have intended to move forward with the project but obscure any involvement by Mr. Musk or Tesla.”
At the time, State told me that writing “Tesla” in that space was a clerical error. It insisted it should have been a generic entry that read “electric vehicle manufacturer.” On one hand, changing it makes them look guilty. On the other hand, the very real graft and corruption perpetrated by Musk and other Trump associates is out in the open. They are hardly trying to hide it.
Verizon once had a contract to upgrade the communications systems of the Federal Aviation Administration worth around $2 billion. Musk suggested it wasn’t up to the task and said that SpaceX, a company he owns, should do it instead. That’s happening. Musk and his companies were facing several investigations and pending regulations related to Neuralink, X, and SpaceX. Using DOGE, he’s decimated the agencies in charge of many of those investigations.
Musk has celebrated these perceived wins publicly. He posts about them on X. Trump praised Starlink during an interview with Sean Hannity. There’s going to be a lot of corruption in the next four years, and a lot of it simply won’t be hidden.
If State ends up buying Teslas, Musk will post about how awesome it’s going to be for the government to drive his cars. Trump will announce the deal with fanfare and praise. He’d come out and say he got a really good deal from Elon on electric vehicles. It won’t be hidden. It’ll be right in front of our faces.
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