1. United States
2. Iowa
3. Letter

I am writing to express my serious concern about the Department of Defense’s new $9.7 billion contract with Dell. While I understand the goal is to consolidate software and cloud services to save money, the details surrounding this deal look incredibly bad and raise some major red flags about government ethics. According to official financial disclosures, President Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million of Dell stock in February, followed by even more stock purchases in March. On top of that, he has been using his rallies and public platform to actively praise Dell and tell his supporters to buy their products. To have a sitting president buy millions of dollars in stock, publicly advertise for that specific company, and then have his administration hand that same company a $9 billion government contract is a massive conflict of interest. Even if everything was done by the book, it looks terrible. It completely erodes public trust and makes it look like federal contracts are being handed out based on personal financial gain and political favoritism rather than what is best for the country and the taxpayer.