Did the Trump State Department come up with the idea to order $400 million worth of armored Tesla vehicles? No, that's not true: The original proposal to buy armored electric vehicles for the State Department came during the Biden administration in April 2024. The $400 million line item was included in a State Department Procurement Forecast Fiscal Year 2025 in December, 2024, after Trump was elected but before he took office. A State Department spokesperson told Lead Stories the solicitation "is on hold and there are no current plans to issue it."
The claim appeared in a post on X (archived here) on February 12, 2025. It said:
What???
The State Department announced today that it is buying $400,000,000 worth of Teslas???
This corruption cannot stand.
Here is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Feb 13 17:13:25 2025 UTC)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk (archived here) has spent much of his time recently focused on leading the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE (archived here), where he claims his efforts have already resulted in uncovering millions of wasted tax dollars (archived here).
But there is no evidence that, while Musk was hunting for tax savings, the Trump administration came up with the idea to buy $400 million of Teslas.
The State Department first put out a request for information (archived here) with a PDF attachment about "armoring of existing commercially available electric vehicles" during the Biden administration on April 23, 2024:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Feb 13 17:13:25 2025 UTC)
According to a Trump State Department spokesperson, only one company responded to that solicitation request at the time, but the spokesperson wouldn't disclose who and said no contract has been issued:
No government contract has been awarded to Tesla or any other vehicle manufacturer to produce armored electric vehicles for the Department of State. The previous Administration asked the Department of State to explore interest from private companies to produce armored electric vehicles. In response to that request last year, the Department did a public Request for Information (RFI) for an armored electric vehicle to solicit interest. The Department received interest from only one company at that time. As a next step in that process, an official solicitation would be sent out to vehicle manufacturers to bid. However, the solicitation is on hold and there are no current plans to issue it.
The $400 million Armored Electric Vehicles request was included as a line item with other armored vehicle requests in the Fiscal Year 2025 State Department Procurement Forecast (archived here):
(Source: U.S. Department of State screenshot taken on Fri Feb 13 19:20:09 2025 UTC)
(Source: U.S. Department of State screenshot taken on Fri Feb 13 19:19:19 2025 UTC)
When Lead Stories reviewed the spreadsheet on February 13, 2025, the word "Tesla" was not included. The spreadsheet indicated that that line item had been updated on February 12, 2025:
(Source: U.S. Department of State screenshot taken on Fri Feb 13 21:24:19 2025 UTC)
Teslarati (archived here), an online news website that covers Tesla issues, reported the word "Tesla" was removed from the procurement list (archived here) after it first broke the story about the $400 million proposed expenditure (archived here).
For more Lead Stories fact checks of claims involving Tesla, click here.
