It didn’t take long for Ramp to find a willing audience. Within Trump’s first three months in office, its executives scored at least four private meetings with the president’s appointees at the General Services Administration, which oversees major federal contracting. Some of the meetings were organized by the nation’s top procurement officer, Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service.
GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies.
Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in the tech world and who spent millions aiding Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, has invested in seven separate rounds of funding for Ramp, according to data from PitchBook. Last year Thiel said there was “no one better positioned” to build products at the intersection of AI and finance.
To date, the company has raised about $2 billion in venture capital, according to startup tracking website Crunchbase, much of it from firms with ties to Trump and Musk. Ramp’s other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies.
The special attention Gruenbaum paid to Ramp raised flags inside and outside the agency. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. He said career civil servants should lead the process to pick the best choice for taxpayers.
A senior GSA official, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said the high level attention Ramp received was unusual, especially before a bid had been made public. “You don’t want to give this impression that leadership has already decided the winner somehow.”
GSA told ProPublica it “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices,” with a spokesperson adding that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Ramp did not respond to requests for comment.
Rabois, one of Ramp’s earliest investors, is part of an influential group of tech titans known as the “PayPal Mafia.” Leaders of the early payments company include several influential players surrounding the Trump administration, including Musk and Thiel. Rabois and his husband, Jacob Helberg, hosted a fundraiser that pulled in upwards of $1 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to media reports. Trump has nominated Helberg for a senior role at the State Department.
Rabois sits on Ramp’s board of directors. He has said he had no plans to join the Trump administration, instead telling CNBC: “I have ideas, I can spoon-feed them to the right people.” He told ProPublica his comments to CNBC were about big-picture policy ideas and that he had “no involvement in any government-related initiatives for the company.” Ramp “could be a great choice for any government that wants to improve its efficiencies,” Rabois added.
Helberg said he has no involvement “in anything related to Ramp whatsoever.”
Thrive Capital, Kushner’s firm, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Thiel did not provide a comment. 8VC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House or Musk; previously, Musk has said “I’ll recuse myself” if conflict-of-interest issues arise.
Ramp’s meetings with Gruenbaum — who comes from private equity firm KKR and has no prior government experience — came at an opportune moment. GSA will decide by year’s end whether to extend the SmartPay contract, and preparations are afoot for the next generation of the program. SmartPay has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the financial institutions that currently operate it, U.S. Bank and Citibank.
Gruenbaum and acting GSA administrator Stephen Ehikian entered the agency with a strong belief that SmartPay and other government payment programs were rife with fraud or waste, causing huge losses, sources within GSA say — an idea echoed in Ramp’s January memo.
Yet both GOP and Democratic budget experts, as well as former GSA officials, describe that view as ill-informed. SmartPay, which provides Visa and Mastercard charge cards to government employees, enables the federal workforce to purchase office supplies and equipment, book travel and pay for gas.
The cards typically are used to fund travel and purchases up to $10,000.
“SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” said former GSA commissioner Sonny Hashmi, who oversaw the program. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems … with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”
Jessica Riedl, a GOP budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, said the notion that there was significant fraud in the charge card technology was far-fetched. She had criticized waste in government credit card programs before the latest SmartPay system was implemented in 2018.
“This was a huge problem about 20-25 years ago,” she said. “In the past 15 years, there have been new controls put into government credit card purchases.”
by Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro, Pro Publica | Read more:
Image: smartpay.gsa.gov
[ed. Every time someone uses the term 'waste, fraud and abuse' I know they're either lying or clueless. It has to be the most hollow and meaningless phrase to come out of this administration and others since 'thoughts and prayers' and 'fake news'. You don't fire 17 agency inspector generals who's duties were doing exactly that: rooting out waste, fraud and abuse if you're actually serious.]
