Starting last fall, the Department of Homeland Security spent $464 million on a no-bid contract to buy 10 used airplanes from a firm in Northern Virginia.
That was an enormous price tag, but the department said it had no time to consider other offers. The planes were needed urgently for deportation flights.
But since then, the department has barely used this new fleet — for deportations, or anything else.
Three of the aircraft are luxury business jets. Just months after acquiring them, the department sought to loan or lease two to other agencies, including one for the use of F.B.I. director Kash Patel, according to a letter to the department sent Wednesday by top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The other seven are older Boeing 737 passenger jets, which the government has left parked at an airport in Lake Charles, La., for months at a time. An internal government document, obtained by The New York Times, said the agency did not have the staff necessary to operate them.
The acquisitions were part of a surge of rushed contracts handed out recently by the Homeland Security Department, which has repeatedly used the need for “urgency” to bypass regular contracting procedures. The idled planes highlight the risks of that approach. The agency rushed headlong to spend nearly half a billion dollars, only to end up with planes it did not fly.
The contract also illuminated a broader trend within the second Trump administration: no-bid contracts awarded to people with connections to Mr. Trump or his cabinet secretaries. The company that received this contract, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, is led by a chairman who had donated to a political committee supporting the previous Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem.
The department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has long outsourced its deportation flights by chartering planes from private companies. It also uses military and Coast Guard aircraft. Because of that, former immigration officials said there seemed to be little need for the department to take on the expense of buying and maintaining a significant number of its own aircraft.
“If you asked me to write a list of the things ICE needed to increase the number of deportations, buying its own fleet of airplanes would absolutely not make the top ten,” said John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.
In a written statement, the Homeland Security Department sought to shift responsibility for the contract to Ms. Noem. President Trump fired her in March, and appointed Markwayne Mullin, a Republican Senator from Oklahoma, as secretary.
“The contract for Daedalus was made and approved by department leadership before Secretary Mullin was sworn in,” the department said in a statement. The agency said it “reserves the right to adjust course in an environment with evolving requirements and demands.”
A spokeswoman for Ms. Noem sought to place the responsibility on Mr. Mullin instead, saying the purchase was “finalized” under his leadership.
Contracting records show that the size of the contract increased by $303 million on the day that Mr. Mullin was sworn in as secretary.
The agency said that the idle 737 passenger jets had been undergoing maintenance checks, and that there were plans for two of them to begin deportation flights later this month.
The situation with the planes was reminiscent of the department’s about-face on a plan to acquire warehouses to hold detainees. The department spent heavily on those when Ms. Noem was secretary, but reversed itself just months later under Mr. Mullin. The department is now giving away or selling seven warehouses that it bought for more than $700 million.
A letter sent to the department Wednesday by Democratic senators Patty Murray of Washington and Christopher Murphy of Connecticut, who sit on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Homeland Security officials had already conceded to the committee that most of the planes would not be used for deportations.
“The American people deserve a full accounting of this gross misuse of their tax dollars,” the letter, which was reviewed by The Times, said.
The senators asked for details about the purchase price of each plane and how they would be used.
Federal law generally requires government agencies to seek competing bids before awarding a contract, to ensure taxpayers get the best deal. But the department sidestepped that requirement for the planes contract, by invoking an exemption for cases of “unusual and compelling urgency.”
That exemption can be used only when delaying the contract would result in “serious injury, financial or other,” to the government. Historically, it has been used during natural disasters, war and the coronavirus pandemic.
The department declined to answer questions about what serious injury it was trying to prevent. Contracting regulations require agencies to publish the rationales for no-bid contracts, but the department refused to release this one, saying it “would compromise national security or create other security risks.”
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The department has invoked the urgency exemption to justify more than $29 billion in spending across about 500 contracts awarded during Mr. Trump’s second term, according to an analysis of federal data by The Times. Much of that total came from border wall spending. Urgency claims were also used to justify projects like the $220 million in media contracts awarded to firms tied to Ms. Noem and her allies, scrutiny over which contributed to her ouster.
The exemption accounts for nearly two-thirds of the $34 billion that the department has spent on contracts signed in 2026. That’s up sharply from past years. In 2025, the figure was about one-quarter. In 2024, it was less than 1 percent.
No other major agency has used the exemption for urgency as frequently as Homeland Security, even in an administration that has turned to no-bid contracts repeatedly — for event planning, fountain repair and the troubled makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Lorna Tedder, a retired contracting expert who spent more than three decades at the Defense Department, said that, “Some things truly are urgent — people are going to die if you don’t do this.” But if agencies claim the exemption all the time, “it will eventually be abused.”
The contract for the planes was first awarded in late November. At the time, the government was already paying other contractors hundreds of millions to operate a network of charter flights called “ICE Air.”
The immigration agency has chartered about 25,800 flights in Mr. Trump’s second term, shuttling immigrants between detention centers domestically and deporting them abroad, mainly to Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the ICE Flight Monitor tracking project at Human Rights First, a nonprofit advocacy group. The department sometimes has 25 or more planes in the air in a day, according to the nonprofit’s tracking.
But at the time, the Homeland Security Department said it still needed its own planes.
Last fall, Tricia McLaughlin, a department spokeswoman, told The Washington Post that purchasing the planes would allow “ICE to operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.” Ms. McLaughlin has since left the agency. The department did not respond directly to a question asking about her comments.
Daedalus, the Arlington, Va.-based company the government hired to find the planes, had not previously held a federal contract. However, a company spokesman said it had worked as a subcontractor to other companies evacuating Afghans who had done work for the U.S. government.
Daedalus’s chairman is William Walters, a doctor who until 2021 led a State Department office that evacuated Americans from outbreaks of Ebola, Covid-19 and other crises. In 2024, after leaving government, Mr. Walters donated $10,000 to a political committee connected to Ms. Noem, then the governor of South Dakota.
Last year, with Ms. Noem in charge, the agency gave a separate company run by Mr. Walters a contract worth nearly $700 million to encourage immigrants to leave the U.S. voluntarily.
A Daedalus spokesman said that Mr. Walters was unaware that the political committee was tied to Ms. Noem.
Daedalus declined to say how much each of the 10 planes had cost, or what its profit margin was for acting, essentially, as a broker. It provided a written statement that it was proud to provide “the best value to the American taxpayer.”
One of the planes is a Boeing 737 luxury jet, now painted in the color scheme of Mr. Trump’s new Air Force One. Two others are smaller Gulfstream business jets, each seating about 14 people.
Those planes flew only sporadically after the agency acquired them, according to flight records from airplanes.live, an independent flight tracking service. And the department soon moved to jettison two of them to other agencies, according to the account from Senate Democrats and the internal document reviewed by The Times.
One of the luxury jets “has already been leased to the F.B.I. for 12 months to support director Patel’s travel — despite the fact that the F.B.I. already has its own jets to support the director’s travel,” the Senate Democrats wrote.
The F.B.I. confirmed that it is using one of the Gulfstream jets, saying it was paying the Homeland Security Department significantly less than it had paid a private company to lease a similar plane and that the aircraft was being used to support a range of agency operations, in addition to Mr. Patel’s travel.
The Homeland Security Department also wanted to lend the larger Boeing luxury jet to the Pentagon, according to the senators’ letter and the internal document. But a Pentagon spokesman said no agreement had been signed.
One Gulfstream jet will remain with Homeland Security, for the use of its top leaders, according to the letter.
The other 737s seemed more suited for deportation flights. Flight records show they had been in active use by Avelo Airlines, a low-cost carrier that also flew charter flights for ICE.
But when the government bought them, it parked them.
Daedalus said that two were used briefly to evacuate Americans from the Middle East at the outbreak of the Iran War in early March.
Senate Democrats said they were told by Homeland Security staff that four of the 737s were no longer expected to fly detained immigrants. The senators said the department said it would use them to fly members of Congress on overseas trips, a job now handled by commercial carriers or military aircraft.
For the long term, the agency said it needs a contractor to provide crews and mechanics to operate its new fleet. A recent solicitation said that contract would start next summer.
Devlin Barrett and Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
