What she's watching feels truer by the day. Trump's State Department just now randomly going to give Tesla $400 million for armored Teslas, which after complaints was reworded to "armored electric vehicles." This is after the same administration killed programs to expand EV uptake and build EV infrastructure.
What she's watching feels truer by the day. Trump's State Department just now randomly going to give Tesla $400 million for armored Teslas, which after complaints was reworded to "armored electric vehicles." This is after the same administration killed programs to expand EV uptake and build EV infrastructure.
Contract originated with Biden’s administration, bud.
While this is well written, it unfortunately doesn't go the extra mile which would still imply something fishy is going on and that it was likely a recent manipulation by the Trump Administration.
Why the deal is obvious fishy
The only evidence this was carried out under the Biden administration is that it was dated December 2024, but those dates were manually written and the file could easily have been manipulated later. The fact the terminology used was "armored Tesla" should be eyebrow raising, because the original request was for armored electric vehicles and they would not likely specify a specific maker even if only one was participating. For example the military labels m&m's as "pan-coated chocolate wafers." But enough on that aspect, what is most telling is the disconnect on money. The original request was on information pertaining to using existing electric vehicles and the ability to up armor them (link). Going by NPR this lead to what was supposed to be a procurement worth of $483k for vehicles and $3m for support equipment based on a leaked document from 2024. Lets say $3.5m for this. That's no where close to $400m as laid out in the procurement documents that were recently exposed.
For comparison we can compare the proposed contract with the existing contract the State Department has with GM for armored SUVs, which makes clear why the money amount for the armored Teslas proposed stinks like rotten fish mixed with manure. In 2023 GM was awarded a $300m contract to produce purpose built armored SUVs over 9 years. That was to produce 200 SUVs a year for 9 years, so 1,800 SUVs. But this decision wasn't made out of the blue, GM had to first build a vehicle, have it tested, and be approved before this stage was even reached. GM was awarded a $36.4m contracted in 2021 to build 10 test vehicles which then lead up to the $300m 2023 contract.
With the Tesla deal you have what is a request soliciting for information in May-April of 2024 on the possibility and feasibility of using commercial built and up armored vehicles magically transform into a $400m procurement contract in 2025. That is the cost of a entire fleet of vehicles and it completely skips the testing phase to evaluate the success of such an effort, in short there is no way this would have been proposed under the Biden Administration and there is no way in hell the Republicans wouldn't have spotted and cried foul if such a proposal was even being worked on.
Edit: and to prove the point further, Musk is now taking over an existing $2b contract that Verizon won in 2023 to upgrade the Federal Aviation Administration facilities from their existing copper lines, which included installing new fiber optic lines and now Musk is going to give it to Starlink. I don't know if they resolved it, but I know it was already shown the more people that were using Starlink the slower speeds were becoming. Putting a nation-wide system on such a system seems like a dumb move, especially when land lines would have significantly higher bandwidth.
While this is well written, it unfortunately doesn't go the extra mile which would still imply something fishy is going on and that it was likely a recent manipulation by the Trump Administration.
I forgot about this post. I don’t usually respond after a month, but since someone already bumped it…
I’ll admit that I basically just checked Snopes because their reputation for being factual seemed pretty solid. I do remember something about them being too easy on Trump regarding some of his comments on Charlottesville, but thought it was likely a one-time thing. I don’t really have anything to say about whether any of this other stuff is true or not, but I probably won’t be relying on Snopes as much from now on.
