The Trump Administration Has Already Directed Tens of Millions to a Company Under DOJ Investigation

As President Donald Trump vows a crackdown on federal “waste, fraud and abuse,” his nascent administration has already awarded tens of millions to a company that the Department of Justice is investigating for potentially ripping off several government bureaus.

More than two years ago, the DOJ opened a price-fixing probe into software company Carahsoft, demanding that the IT vendor turn over thousands of documents related to billions worth of contracts that Carahsoft had signed with numerous federal agencies.

Specifically, the Justice Department sought to determine whether Carahsoft “conspired” to make “false claims to the Department of Defense by coordinating the bids, prices, and/or market for SAP software, cloud storage, and related hardware and services.”

(SAP is a Germany-based software company that also does work with the federal government and is under DOJ scrutiny for alleged price-fixing, settling DOJ claims of foreign bribery for $220 million last year.)

But the Carahsoft investigation broke into public view in September, after the FBI raided the company’s Virginia headquarters. Carahsoft said the raid was part of an “investigation into a company in which Carahsoft has done business in the past,” a company representative told Bloomberg at the time, though the truth about the raid still isn’t clear.

The investigation is ongoing as the DOJ continues to compel the release of further records and documents. The DOJ hasn’t sought to penalize the company yet, and Carahsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

In the months since the raid, Carahsoft has continued to do business with the federal government, including booking 19 contracts worth about $30 million since Trump took office. (The Trump administration also did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

The recent contracts include more than $15 million awarded by the Department of Health and Human Services as well as $10 million from the Social Security Administration, public records show.

Those contracts come as Trump and Elon Musk work to shred agencies and organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development that they claim are ripping off taxpayers with “insane” spending. (Many of the examples the White House cited while attacking USAID arose from spending entirely unrelated to the agency, NOTUS found.)

Regardless, the Trump administration has laid off the vast majority of USAID employees. And agencies across the federal workforce are preparing for large-scale cuts, with some government bureaus preparing for 70% reductions and others, like the Federal Advisory Council on Occupational Safety and Health, preparing to be shuttered.

The ongoing probe into Carahsoft isn’t the first time the DOJ has accused the company of wrongdoing. In 2015, Carahsoft and another software company, VMware, agreed to pay $75.5 million as part of a civil settlement after the DOJ said the vendors had overcharged the federal government.

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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.