The Biden administration has awarded private companies hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts to house illegal aliens amid an unprecedented surge at the southern border. One of the major recipients is a Democrat-linked logistics company that owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.
Federal law prohibits agencies from awarding grants to companies with unpaid federal taxes. But Deployed Resources, a New York-based contractor that owes $585,075 in unpaid taxes, received $964 million in federal contracts this year to house illegal immigrants in North Carolina and Texas. That windfall comes as Deployed Resources cultivated ties to the Democratic Party.
Tom Ziemba, an executive at Deployed Resources and president of its sister company, Deployed Services, has contributed more than $34,000 to Democrats, and has consulted for various Democratic groups. His ex-wife, Julie Mason, served as chief of staff for Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband until June 2022. Mason joined Deployed Services earlier this year as executive vice president for communications.
"The federal government has numerous controls to ensure award recipients are lawful and ethical actors, but these appear to be disregarded amid the Biden administration’s humanitarian crisis at the border," said Pete McGinnis, the communications director for the Functional Government Initiative, a government watchdog group.
Contracts to Deployed Resources, awarded largely by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services, ballooned from $147 million in 2020 to $944 million in 2022. The IRS filed tax liens against the New York-based company in October 2022 for unpaid taxes from 2020 and 2021, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Deployed Resources is not the first Democrat-linked firm to score lucrative contracts from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The San Antonio-based Family Endeavors, which hired Biden transition adviser Andrew Lorenzen-Strait in early 2021, received a $579 million no-bid contract from the office in March 2021, the Free Beacon reported. The Office of Refugee Resettlement’s budget has quadrupled even as it lost track of more than 100,000 unaccompanied children. Nearly all of the new spending has gone to Deployed Resources, Family Endeavors, and one other contractor.
Deployed Services has received $335 million in contracts since 2021 to provide "direct care" services at the North Carolina facility operated by Deployed Resources. That includes $261 million in no-bid contracts since last year, a practice that Vice President Harris and other Democrats have decried.
McGinnis said the contracts have been awarded "without proper oversight, even after contract recipients were tagged with clear misconduct, including unpaid taxes."
"Sadly, these cartel-friendly policies appear dysfunctional at every turn," he told the Free Beacon.
In 2019, the Government Accountability Office found that Health and Human Services and four other agencies rarely complied with the regulations regarding contracts for companies with IRS debts. Federal contractors are required to disclose whether they have any unpaid debt. Agencies must either deny contracts for tax scofflaws or consider whether they should be suspected.
The Government Accountability Office criticized Customs and Border Protection in 2019 over a $12 million contract with Deployed Resources for a migrant housing facility in Tornillo, Tex. According to the report, the government paid Deployed Resources for 650,000 meals that were never ordered. The facility was designed to hold 2,500 migrants at a time, but only 68 stayed there on average per day.
Deployed Resources did not respond to numerous requests for comment. DHS and HHS did not respond to requests for comment.