If you wrote this as a screenplay, the studio would send it back and say it’s too corrupt to be believable. A guy works on the Biden-Harris transition team. Leaves government. Gets hired by a nonprofit. Two months later, that nonprofit lands a half-billion-dollar sole-source contract from the same administration he just left. No competition. No bidding. No questions asked.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a heist with a government letterhead.
The Setup
The nonprofit is Family Endeavors Inc. The man is Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former ICE official who served as an advisor on Biden’s transition team. On January 20, 2021 — Inauguration Day — Endeavors named him Senior Director for Migrant Services and Federal Affairs.
By March 2021, two things happened in rapid succession. Endeavors sent an unsolicited email to the Office of Refugee Resettlement offering help with unaccompanied minors. Three days later — three days — the Administration for Children and Families awarded Endeavors a $529 million sole-source contract to build and operate an emergency intake site in Pecos, Texas. Two thousand beds. No competitive bidding. No open competition.
For context, Endeavors’ entire budget in 2018 was $43 million. They went from $43 million to $529 million overnight because the right guy knew the right people at the right time. By April — one month in — the government had already wired them $255 million.
The Inspector General’s Verdict
The new IG report doesn’t mince words. The Biden administration’s ACF knew months in advance that they’d need more shelter beds. They had time to plan. They had time to open competitive bidding. They chose not to. Instead, they cited a COVID-related emergency to justify skipping procurement rules — an emergency the IG says didn’t actually prevent them from following the law.
The contract price was more than double ACF’s own internal cost estimate of $244 million. Then the agency modified the contract fifteen times, extending it to May 2022 and inflating the value to more than triple the original estimate. Every modification made the deal sweeter for Endeavors and worse for the taxpayer.
When the IG asked ACF for documentation — the price analysis, the cost estimates, the review process — ACF couldn’t produce it. Their excuse? They were “under significant time constraints.” Translation: we were in too much of a hurry to create a paper trail for the half-billion dollars we just handed to our buddy’s new employer.
The Hidden Camera
This is where it goes from suspicious to cinematic. Project Veritas obtained undercover video of Lorenzen-Strait talking about government contracts. On camera, he reportedly referred to the Endeavors deal as a “corrupt bargain.” His words. Not a critic’s characterization. Not a Republican talking point. The guy who brokered the deal called it corrupt himself.
He also discussed brokering a separate deal that won Cherokee Federal — a group of tribally owned contracting companies — a nearly $2 billion HHS contract for unaccompanied minors. On the video, he reportedly admitted Cherokee Federal wasn’t equipped to handle the contract. He also admitted to hiding his participation in government contracts through shell entities called VerdinPoint and The Tanager Group while publicly presenting himself through a different company.
Shell companies. Hidden involvement. Self-described corrupt bargains. A nonprofit that went from a $43 million budget to a half-billion-dollar government contract in two months. This isn’t government waste. This is government looting.
The Facility Nobody Used
Here’s the punchline that costs you money. The facility Endeavors built in Pecos with your tax dollars? According to HHS, it wasn’t even used during the last year of the Biden administration. The government spent more than $1.8 billion on migrant housing infrastructure that sat empty while the bill went to the American taxpayer.
An HHS spokesperson under Trump said the contract was cancelled early in this administration “as soon as this mismanagement was discovered.” Secretary Kennedy is now working to implement stricter accountability measures across the agency.
Good. Because what happened here wasn’t mismanagement. Mismanagement is losing track of a spreadsheet. This was a former government insider walking through a revolving door, landing at a nonprofit, and pulling a half-billion dollars back through that door behind him — while the agency responsible couldn’t even produce receipts.
The Pattern
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s how Washington has operated for decades. Officials cycle between government and the private sector, taking their contacts and their insider knowledge with them. Contracts get awarded to the right people. Competition gets waived. Paperwork gets lost. And by the time anyone notices, the money is gone and the people responsible have moved on to their next gig.
The Biden administration didn’t invent the revolving door. But they spun it faster than a carnival ride, and Endeavors was the lucky winner. A nonprofit that sent an unsolicited email on a Tuesday and had $529 million by Friday.
Congressional investigators started asking questions in 2023. The IG report just confirmed what everyone suspected. And the man who called his own deal a “corrupt bargain” on hidden camera still hasn’t answered for it.
Some bargains are too good to be true. This one was too corrupt to hide.