Financial technology startup Ramp has leveraged its political connections for at least four meetings with Trump administration appointees at the General Services Administration in seeking a contract for a project to revamp a $700-billion charge card federal employees use, according to a ProPublica report.
The GSA did not respond Friday to a message from Payments Dive seeking comment.
The agency told ProPublica it “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices,” with a spokesperson adding that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Created in 1998, SmartPay is the government’s charge card program for federal employees at about 550 agencies, allowing them to purchase travel, office supplies, gasoline and other work-related expenses on the Visa and Mastercard branded cards. The program has generated hundreds of millions in fees for the banks that operate it currently, U.S. Bank and Citibank, ProPublica reported.
The pilot project would be worth as much as $25 million for Ramp, ProPublica reported Thursday citing unnamed sources familiar with the effort. The top U.S. procurement officer, Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, organized some of the meetings, ProPublica reported. Gruenbaum was appointed to the role in January, according to a GSA press release.
The GSA will decide by year end whether to extend the SmartPay contract, and is planning for the program’s next generation, according to the news report.
SmartPay handled $39.7 billion in government spending and 90 million transactions in the 2024 fiscal year, with an average $441 per transaction, according to the GSA.
New York-based Ramp Business, founded in 2019, sells a financial operations platform to handle various tasks such as expense management, accounting, travel and procurement along with software tools to analyze and optimize corporate spending.
Ramp is competing “in a standard procurement process” for the pilot program, company spokesperson Lindsay McKinley wrote Friday in an email. “Ramp’s technology has prevented billions of dollars in wasted spend across the economy, and if chosen, we’ll bring those same results to the American taxpayer.”
The GSA’s SmartPay request for information proposals process is still in progress, she said.
The “high-level attention that Ramp received was unusual, especially before a bid had been made public,” ProPublica reported, citing a senior GSA official who requested anonymity for fear of retribution.
Ramp’s investors include billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter whose Founders Fund has invested in seven rounds of funding for the startup, Pro Publica reported, citing PitchBook investment data. Ramp has raised about $2 billion in venture funding, much of it from firms tied to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the publication reported, citing startup research site Crunchbase.
Ramp investors include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, the firm founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, an Austin, Texas-based venture capital firm co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir Technologies, with Thiel, and a major financial supporter of Trump.
