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Yesterday Drop Site News pointed out a strange line item in the State Department’s procurement forecast for 2025. State planned to spend $400 million on “Armored Teslas.” This isn’t too weird, State buys a lot of vehicles and spends a lot of money putting armor on them. What was weird was that someone edited the spreadsheet so it didn’t mention Tesla and then re-uploaded it.
After Drop Site News published the story, it went viral and hit the pages of the New York Times. Rachel Maddow talked about it on MSNBC. Elon Musk called her a liar and said he didn’t know anything about a $400 million Tesla contract. The story did another round after State tweaked its spreadsheet to remove the mention of Tesla.
The saga of the Armored Teslas is important. It’s a story where multiple things are true at the same time and a warning about how we consume information over the next four years.
Here are the four conflicting truths. The first is that State buying $400 million worth of armored Teslas is not strange. The second is that most of us don’t know how to read a federal budgeting document. The third is that Musk is the richest man on the planet with billions in government contracts. The fourth is that editing an innocuous budget document after someone notices “Tesla” has a line item is weird and speaks volumes about how the federal government is operating under the Trump-Musk presidency.
Let’s start with one and two. I have spent years of my life reporting on waste, fraud, and abuse and combing through federal budget documents. State’s original spreadsheet isn’t weird. It’s called a Procurement Forecast and isn’t actually its official budget. This is a planning document the law requires it to publish. This is money the State thinks it might spend but hasn’t committed yet. It says as much as the top of the webpage where it’s listed. Its actual budget is much longer and lives here.
The original line item is for “Armored Tesla (Production Units).” It has a listed solicitation date of May 1, 2025, and an anticipated award date of September 30, 2025. It’s possible, and even probable, that Tesla wouldn’t have done this work. It looks to me like State has Teslas it wants to put armor on and plans to issue a request for that service in May. A small business could pick up that contract, it won’t necessarily be Musk’s company. The plan would then be to award whoever has the best bid on September 30.
State confirmed this in an email to me and said that no government contract had been awarded to Tesla or any other vehicle manufacturer. It said that the Biden administration had asked it to look into how it might add armor to off-the-shelf electric vehicles and it was in the early stages of the project.
The State Department has an entire division that just deals in armor. It’s called the DSS Defensive Equipment and Armored Vehicle Division (DEAV). It spends a lot of money buying armored vehicles and paying people to put armor on vehicles.
Further backing up what State told me is this Request for Information (RFI) that DEAV put out on April 23, 2024. An RFI is one of the very early stages of a government contract. It’s a way for the feds to ask businesses how they might do something and what it might cost without actually awarding the cash.
This specific RFI asked for companies to tell them how they might armor an electric vehicle. “The scope encompasses the design and development, prototype fabrication, and test and evaluation of an electric armored vehicle (sedan, mid-size SUV, or large SUV),” it said. “This requirement only covers design and modifications to existing Commercial platform(s) and components required for the sole purpose of meeting Government’s unique armored vehicle (AV) program needs.”
The State Department told me that only one company responded to its RFI. “As a next step in that process, an official solicitation would be sent out to vehicle manufacturers to bid,” a State Department Spokesperson said. “However, the solicitation is on hold and there are no current plans to issue it.”
As Drop Site News and others have pointed out, this procurement document was modified on December 13, 2024, several weeks before Donald Trump took office. The RFI was also issued long before the election took place. The original spreadsheet also includes lines for “Armored EV (NOT SEDANS)” and “ARMORED BMW.” So it looks like this planning document is in line with other public documents and pretty normal.
Now onto truths three and four.
Musk is a billionaire who makes a lot of money from contracts and editing the document after it was noticed is weird. A search of government databases for SpaceX and Tesla Motors returns hundreds of contracts worth billions in contracts. He doesn’t need the $400 million and it’s believable that he is telling the truth when he says he didn’t know anything about it.
After all this became public, someone edited the spreadsheet to remove mention of “Tesla.” According to State, it was fixing a mistake. “It should have been a generic entry ‘electric vehicle manufacturer,’’ a State Department Spokesperson told me. I think that’s true, but I also think it’s weird that they did a stealth edit without issuing any kind of statement to the press beforehand. It reeks of ass-covering. Hell, it is ass-covering.
There’s going to be a lot of bullshit over the next four years. Musk and DOGE and Trump are breaking down the federal government and selling it for parts. They are both going to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers. They’ve been doing it for years.
But it’s important that we fight the battles worth fighting, that we learn how our government works, and that we stick to the truth. Pouring over government spreadsheets and getting worked up over phantom distributions to Tesla isn’t productive. There’s plenty of real graft to go around.
