No Bid. No Experience. $150 Million.

There is a particular species of American villainy that doesn’t bother with the drama of a smoking gun; it simply files the paperwork correctly and lets the children sort themselves out.

Behold the Burke Law Group of Houston, Texas, newly anointed by the Department of Health and Human Services to represent unaccompanied migrant children in immigration court, for the tidy sum of $150 million, awarded without the vulgar inconvenience of competitive bidding.

One does not put a contract like that out to tender when one already knows which cousin is getting the job.

Twenty-five lawyers on the firm’s roster, and precisely two of them claim any relevant immigration experience — a ratio that would embarrass a used-car lot.

The founder, Marcella Burke, cut her teeth as a Trump appointee at the EPA and Interior, which qualifies her to discuss wetlands regulations and very little about a frightened twelve-year-old’s asylum claim.

Also on staff: an architecture crusader whose chief public passion is forcing federal buildings into Doric columns, and a “senior counsel” better known for op-eds than orphans.

It is less a law firm than a reunion of the administration’s least employable friends, dressed up as a mercy mission and billed to the taxpayer at a rate that would make a Gilded Age robber baron wonder what went wrong.

Meanwhile — and here the comedy curdles into something closer to a crime scene — the government let the previous contract lapse on a Friday, cutting loose a network of nearly a hundred legal aid groups with two decades of actual expertise, after stiffing them on payment for the better part of a year.

Some 24,000 children were left in the gap between one government’s broken promise and its replacement’s inexperience, which is precisely the kind of arithmetic a functioning democracy is supposed to find intolerable and a booboisie finds merely regrettable, like weather.

It gets stranger still.

Lawyers showed up uninvited in courtrooms from Chicago to Houston, video-streaming in to claim they’d been asked by the government to “appear on behalf” of children they’d never met, already clutching those children’s private identifying information like a pickpocket clutching a wallet he swears he found on the sidewalk.

A judge, God bless the man, simply refused to let the stranger watch.

That a federal judge had to personally intervene to stop an unauthorized lawyer from acquiring a migrant child’s case file by ambush tells you everything about the seriousness with which this operation was assembled.

The American system doesn’t produce villains so much as it produces beneficiaries — men and women who never had to conspire because the system simply handed them the spoils and asked no questions.

Nobody broke a law here.

That is precisely the horror of it.

A cabinet department found a law firm full of the president’s friends, wrote them a check nine figures long, handed them children who cannot vote, cannot lobby, and cannot hire better lawyers than the ones assigned to lose their case for them, and called it due process.