Rep. Gerald Connolly, ranking member of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, has initiated an investigation into whether expense management startup Ramp is receiving preferential treatment in its bid for a $25 million government contract.
Connolly sent a letter to General Services Administration (GSA) Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian demanding information and documents related to the GSA’s reported plans to award a contract for a pilot program to Ramp. News of the probe was first reported by ProPublica.
Among Connolly’s biggest concerns are that Ramp allegedly has “zero federal contracting experience” and its investors include a number of Trump allies and supporters. Those investors include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital (founded by Josh Kushner, brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared), vocal Trump supporter 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale, and Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and brother of former Republican President George W. Bush. Rabois, according to Connolly’s letter, raised more than $1 million for Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.
Connolly is requesting several things from the GSA, including a detailed list of all meetings between any GSA official and any Ramp representative, and all communications between any GSA official, contractor, or subcontractor and any Ramp representative.
The government’s internal expense card program, dubbed SmartPay, is a $700 billion program. Currently, Citibank and US Bank, two of the nation’s largest suppliers of credit cards, are the official banks of the current SmartPay contract.
In April, Ramp’s head of communications, Lindsay McKinley, confirmed to TechCrunch that the startup was “competing in a standard procurement process for a SmartPay pilot program based on the strength of our solution.”
She claimed that the startup Ramp saw a public post on X shared by the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, on February 18 that said “the US government currently has ~4.6M active credit cards/accounts, which processed ~90M unique transactions for ~$40B of spend in FY24.”
A former customer, Ramp claims, introduced Ramp to GSA a few days later.
However, Connolly alleges that Ramp reportedly began contacting entities in the payment industry about special bank identification numbers required to process government payments before a request for information (RFI) related to the contract was publicly announced.
He also claimed that a GSA employee recently stated that Ramp was the “favorite” to win this business.
Ramp did not have any comment on Connolly’s investigation.
In March, Ramp doubled its valuatio to $13 billion after a $150 million secondary share sale. Since its inception in 2019, the startup has raised over $1 billion in equity financing and $700 million in committed debt funding.