One of the most important stories in some time came out two days ago. But with so much else going it didn’t get quite as much attention as it should have. It’s from ProPublica. And it’s about a Peter Thiel-backed start up called Ramp. It’s a corporate credit card processing outfit. The game here is pretty straightforward. Trump and Musk are looking to hand some or all of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program (SmartPay) over to Ramp. A bunch of the meetings were organized by Josh Gruenbaum, a private equity guy who Trump and Musk installed as chief acquisitions officer at the GSA. (He was also the lead signatory on the demand letter to Harvard we’re now told, as of last night, was accidentally sent. So Gruenbaum’s got a lot going on.) Ramp’s value add is supposed to be the use of AI to monitor spending.
The overall picture is a standard one: Come in, take over the data and financial architecture; discredit it by having your media arms dish out mountains of phony stories about fraud and abuse; fire all the employees and hand a cash-drenched, sweetheart contract to yours and your friends company.
Or maybe it’s a start up, which has already raised about $2 billion from the likes of Peter Thiel and the Kushner family, among others, and thus needs a pretty big exit. It all comes together quite nicely. It’s good to be the king, as Mel Brooks once put it. And I suspect that’s just a prelude to a vastly bigger prize: contracts to manage payments of the more than $1.5 trillion that goes to Social Security recipients and likely other government programs that disperse money directly to individuals.
Now, yesterday I heard that a new DOGEr, named Roland Tenglong Shen, showed up (remotely) at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS) and was hastily granted access to the Bureau’s systems. (Way faster than normal onboarding rules allow.) The focus of his access appears to be something called the Payment Analytics Cloud Environment (PACE) which is itself part of Disbursement And Debt Management Analytics Platform (DDMAP). I’m told it all came together very fast yesterday. At first I thought this might have something to do with DOGE’s new “Defend the Spend” program, which I mentioned last night and was discussed in an article in the Post. The timing seemed to come together very nicely.
But when I got around to googling Shen’s name this morning, that told a different story. Roland Shen works for Ramp. Right, the Thiel and Kushner family-backed company trying to land that motherlode payment processing contract.
Now, when I say “works,” all I can say is that Shen’s LinkedIn bio says he’s worked there from February 2023 until today. (That was after a summer internship at Ramp in 2022, the same year he graduated from USC.) It’s conceivable that Shen recently left Ramp and his LinkedIn page simply hasn’t been updated yet. But that seems unlikely. And lots of people work at DOGE who still keep their private sector jobs. (Short-term “Special Government Employees” are allowed to do this.)
In any case, back in the old days civil servants chose contractors and there was supposed to be a process of competitive bidding, though no bid contracts could come together in some circumstances. But if your company’s wants the contract, it certainly helps to have an employee literally scoping out at the environment in advance.
Late Update: A request for comment from Shen through LinkedIn went unanswered. And as of late Saturday afternoon Shen’s LinkedIn profile had disappeared.
