The Biden administration skirted federal procurement rules to award a $529 million sole source contract to a nonprofit with direct ties to a former administration insider, according to an inspector general's report released Thursday. The nonprofit, Family Endeavors Inc., landed the massive deal just eleven days after cold-emailing the government with an unsolicited proposal — a timeline that defies every norm of federal contracting.
The HHS Office of Inspector General found that the Administration of Children and Families failed to conduct the advanced planning required to use full and open competition for the contract, which funded an emergency intake site for unaccompanied minors in Pecos, Texas. The agency blamed COVID. The IG blamed the agency.
The timeline alone tells the story. The OIG report lays it out with precision:
On March 5, 2021, Endeavors emailed ORR offering emergency assistance for the care of unaccompanied alien children. On March 13, 2021, Endeavors emailed ORR again with an unsolicited proposal, which included a statement of capabilities and concept of operations for an emergency shelter to serve unaccompanied alien children. Three days later, on March 16, 2021, ACF awarded a firm-fixed-price sole source contract to Endeavors to provide and operate an EIS facility in Pecos, Texas.
Eleven days. From a cold email to a contract worth more than half a billion dollars. No competitive bidding. No open competition. No documentation that the agency even analyzed whether the price was reasonable. According to Fox News, the IG report found that ACF could not produce a price analysis or an independent government cost estimate dated before the contract was awarded — despite, as the report noted, "multiple requests."
When pressed for documentation, ACF offered a familiar Washington excuse:
When we asked for documentation, ACF told us that it was under significant time constraints to award contracts.
Except the time pressure was self-inflicted. The IG dismantled the emergency justification in a single finding:
ACF knew well in advance of March 2021 that it was projected to need more shelter beds than existing sites could provide and should have begun contract planning at that time.
In other words, the Biden administration's own agency saw the need coming, failed to plan for it, and then used its own failure as the pretext to skip competitive bidding entirely.
The contract's original value was $529 million for one year and 2,000 beds. ACF's own internal cost estimate for the work was $244 million — meaning the award was more than double what the agency itself believed the job should cost. No explanation for the gap has been provided.
It got worse. The contract was modified 15 times, extending it through May 2022 and inflating the total to more than three times ACF's original estimate. By April 2021 — one month into the contract — federal procurement records showed ACF had already paid $255 million to the nonprofit.
For context, Family Endeavors Inc. had a total organizational budget of $43 million in 2018. Three years later, the federal government handed it a contract worth more than twelve times that figure, with no competitive process and no verifiable cost analysis.
The contract's speed becomes less mysterious when you trace the personnel. Andrew Lorenzen-Strait — a former ICE official who served on the Biden-Harris transition team — was named Senior Director for Migrant Services and Federal Affairs at Family Endeavors Inc. on January 20, 2021. That's Inauguration Day. Two months later, the contracts started flowing.
In September 2023, Rep. Mark Green, then chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Dan Bishop, then chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Accountability, sent Lorenzen-Strait a letter connecting the dots:
On January 20, 2021, Family Endeavors, Inc. (Endeavors) named you the Senior Director for Migrant Services and Federal Affairs. Immediately preceding your position with Endeavors, you served on the Biden-Harris transition team, and previously was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official.
The Endeavors contract in Pecos wasn't the only windfall. The letter noted that ICE awarded a separate $86.9 million sole-source contract to Endeavors in March 2021 — the same month — for beds and services in hotels for illegal immigrants.
The congressional letter referenced a Project Veritas undercover video in which Lorenzen-Strait's own words painted a damning picture. Green and Bishop wrote:
Specifically, you refer to the Endeavors contract as a 'corrupt bargain.' You further discuss 'brokering' a deal that won Cherokee Federal, a team of tribally owned federal contracting companies, a nearly $2 billion contract with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to provide services to unaccompanied alien children.
The letter continued:
In the video, you admit that Cherokee Federal is not equipped to handle the contract. You also admit that while you are publicly involved with the company Deep Water Point & Associates, you hid participation in government contracts through the entities, VerdinPoint and The Tanager Group.
A former government official, hired by a nonprofit on Inauguration Day, who then helped broker billions in contracts — and described the arrangement as a "corrupt bargain" on camera. Family Endeavors told Axios its border work was a "continuation of services" dating back to 2012. The IG report suggests the continuation was of something else entirely.
The contract was canceled in the early months of the Trump administration. An HHS spokesperson framed the scope of the waste bluntly:
The previous administration wasted more than $1.8 billion on a facility intended to house illegal aliens that was not even used in the last year of the previous administration, and that kind of fiscal mismanagement is exactly what Secretary Kennedy is working to correct.
In fact, this contract was canceled in the early months of the Trump administration as soon as this mismanagement was discovered. HHS and ORR remain fully committed to protecting children, restoring accountability at every level of the system, and putting Americans first.
ACF is now implementing stricter accountability measures and strengthening oversight — the kind of basic institutional hygiene that should have existed before a nonprofit with a $43 million budget was handed half a billion dollars on an eleven-day turnaround.
The Biden administration spent four years insisting its border policies were compassionate, orderly, and lawful. The IG report reveals something closer to a procurement free-for-all — an agency that saw a crisis coming, refused to plan, then used the chaos it created to funnel hundreds of millions to a connected nonprofit without competitive bidding, cost analysis, or basic documentation.
This is the machinery that operated behind the rhetoric. Not compassion — carelessness. Not urgency — opportunism. The agency couldn't produce a single document showing it evaluated whether the price was fair. It modified the contract 15 times. It paid a quarter of a billion dollars in the first month alone.
And at the center of it sat a man who moved from the transition team to the nonprofit's payroll on Inauguration Day, who later called his own deal a "corrupt bargain," and who admitted on camera to hiding his involvement in government contracts through shell entities.
The IG put the findings on the record. The question now is whether anyone outside the inspector general's office intends to take action.
