Joe O’Dea Decries “Reckless” Gov’t Spending While He Built a Fortune on Gov’t Contracts
O’Dea made over $400 million in gov’t contracts but says his “business ran the best when we had the least amount of help from our government.”
A new report from Colorado Newsline reveals that wealthy self-funder and GOP Senate candidate Joe O’Dea who decries government spending has made a substantial fortune off of government contracts for his business. Public records show that O’Dea has benefited from more than $400 million in government contracts mostly within the last 15 years.
O’Dea has repeatedly campaigned on “reckless” federal spending and touts the success of his business, however he fails to tell Coloradans that his business’ success is largely attributed to taxpayer money. When making arguments to cut spending, O’Dea has suggested making cuts to critical programs like Medicare and Social Security – while approving spending that benefits his bottom line.
“Coloradans have yet another reason to vote against self-serving CEO Joe O’Dea. He threatens to cut funding for critical programs that help seniors and working Americans while he builds his fortune with taxpayer money. Worse yet, he insults hardworking people and says they need to ‘get off the couch.’ O’Dea can’t be trusted because he would join McConnell and MAGA Republicans in approving a far-right agenda that benefits wealthy CEOs like himself.” – Colorado Democratic Party spokesperson Nico Delgado
As a civil construction company, CEI gets the vast majority of its business from city and county governments, funded overwhelmingly by a mix of local, state and federal dollars. After more than 30 years in business, managing these publicly-funded projects has made O’Dea a wealthy man — and now that wealth is helping propel a Senate campaign whose No. 1 priority, O’Dea says, is slashing government spending.
The dissonance hasn’t gone unnoticed.
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When asked about CEI’s government contracts in a FOX31 interview earlier this month, the first-time candidate sought to make a distinction between other kinds of federal spending and “dollars that are being invested in assets here in Colorado.”
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A Newsline review of publicly available records found more than $400 million in government contracts awarded to CEI by state and local government entities, most of them within the last 15 years. The combined figure likely represents only a portion of the publicly-funded work the company has undertaken since its founding in 1986.
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It’s been a highly lucrative business for CEI’s founder and CEO. In a personal financial disclosure filed earlier this year, O’Dea estimated his net worth at between $17 and $80 million, with CEI stock valued at between $5 million and $25 million, representing his largest single asset.
He’s invested a total of more than $1.6 million of that fortune in his Senate campaign, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures. O’Dea’s early self-funding was key to his strategy in securing the GOP nomination, allowing him to qualify for the June primary ballot via an expensive signature-gathering effort rather than a state party assembly dominated by far-right conspiracy theorists.
Though CEI’s record isn’t spotless — it’s faced penalties for safety violations, including for a 2007 roof collapse in Greenwood Village that injured 13 workers…
But he has been a relentless critic of what he calls “reckless” federal spending under President Joe Biden, including the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2021, and the Inflation Reduction Act, a package of health care and clean energy measures enacted this year. O’Dea said of the latter bill that he “didn’t see anything in there that I like.”
“They’ve got to quit spending,” he told an interviewer earlier this month. “We’ve got to stifle the spending. We’ve got to slow that down.”
“Priority one,” O’Dea’s website says, is to “reduce Biden-era spending to reduce inflation and the deficit.”
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O’Dea, too, has continued to endorse substantial infrastructure investments while drawing a hard line against social spending like health care subsidies and Biden’s plan for student debt relief, arguing that such measures are fueling inflation and amount to an “embrace of socialism by the political elites in Washington.” He has faulted pandemic-era relief measures for “making it too easy not to work,” stressing the need to “get (workers) off the couch,” and has also suggested cuts to longstanding entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
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As O’Dea pitches his small-government message to Colorado voters, his ads and campaign materials have put little emphasis on the specific nature of CEI’s business, while his supporters praise him as a “self-made” entrepreneur. And in another radio interview earlier this year, the candidate who reaped the benefits of hundreds of millions in government funding offered a different interpretation of his success as he promised to “start hacking back this government.”
“We don’t need all that help,” said O’Dea. “My business ran the best when we had the least amount of help from our government.”
Read more in Colorado Newsline.