Swipe Right on Corruption: How a Trump-Backed Startup is Poised to Hijack $700 Billion in Government Spending

Ramp’s rise from fintech startup to federal sweetheart reveals how Trump, Musk, and the PayPal Mafia are privatizing procurement under the guise of efficiency and dismantling oversight in the process.

This ProPublica exposé isn’t just a story about a startup, it’s a parable about how crony capitalism in the Trump-Musk era now wears a startup hoodie and carries a black Amex.

What we’re looking at here is a textbook case of backdoor privatization, dressed up in buzzwords like “efficiency” and “fraud prevention.” Ramp, a corporate credit card startup with no federal experience and deep Trumpworld ties, just happens to get private meetings with the most powerful procurement officials in the country before the government even issues its official request for proposals. Ramp’s $2 billion war chest (fattened by Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois, and Jared Kushner’s brother no less) seems to have bought them more than office snacks and AI dashboards. It may have bought them the keys to a $700 billion kingdom: SmartPay, the internal credit card infrastructure of the U.S. government.

This isn't about fixing fraud. It’s about manufacturing a crisis to justify a handoff to cronies. GSA leadership, fresh from private equity and apparently allergic to due process, slapped a $1 spending limit on federal employees’ cards, crippling field work across NIH, the FAA, and the National Park Service. Then, like clockwork, Ramp swoops in as the presumed savior. A pilot program worth up to $25 million gets opened up for bids for a mere seven business days. Blink and you’d miss it, unless you already knew it was coming.

Let’s be clear: SmartPay isn’t broken. It’s been extensively audited. Fraud levels are low. Even the conservative Manhattan Institute says the panic is outdated. But none of that matters when you’ve got the PayPal Mafia in your corner and DOGE operatives camping overnight in GSA headquarters like they’re launching the next iPhone, not reshaping American procurement.

The conflict-of-interest stench is strong enough to peel paint off the walls. Rabois is on Ramp’s board and hosts Trump fundraisers. His husband is nominated to State. Elon Musk’s man Steve Davis is now whispering into the ear of GSA leadership. And Trump, true to form, signs an executive order centralizing procurement decisions under the same agency rolling out the red carpet for Ramp.

Meanwhile, career civil servants, those pesky people with ethics rules and domain knowledge, are being sidelined. As one anonymous GSA official put it, “You don’t want to give this impression that leadership has already decided the winner somehow.” And yet, here we are.

This whole saga is exactly what Project 2025 is about: breaking the guardrails, gutting federal oversight, and handing public infrastructure to ideologues and investors who see America as a revenue stream. It's “drain the swamp” reimagined as a VC pitch deck, where every institution is just another bloated asset to be stripped, streamlined, and sold off.

So the next time you hear the Trump administration rail against “waste, fraud, and abuse,” remember: they’re not rooting it out, they’re rebranding it.