More Government Waste with No Bid Contracts

Earlier this month, President Obama brought John McCain to the White House to announce a restructuring of the way the US government procures goods and services.   In particular, the Obama administration claimed to limit the practice of using no-bid contracts.  No bid contracts are uncompetitive and result in higher payments for fungible goods and services.  

Within a few days after the words of eliminating no bid contracts left the President’s mouth, his Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, sought to procure for the US Treasury a supply of notebook computers.  Here is the announcement.    The procurement goes through great detail specifying the performance of the computers, what types of drives and memory, the operating system, etc.  It goes on to specify that in fact what the Treasury needs is Dell computers.  Yup, this  "competitive bid", can be filled only by a single source - Dell Computer!  Still, it is put out to bid.  I wonder how many competitive bids the Treasury will get from say HP, IBM, Acer, Gateway or other computer manufacturers?  This is simply more evidence that when Obama speaks he means the opposite of what most people understand his words to mean.