Op-Ed

Tom Price and Trump Team Members Face Criticism for Wasting Money on Travel

The travel habits of Tom Price and other Trump cabinet secretaries raise questions about their concern for taxpayers.

Sep 27, 2017 | By Ryan Alexander | 5 min read | Print Article

Originally published on September 27, 2017 in U.S. News & World Report

Last week we learned that Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price has been using private planes to travel around the country at a cost of what appears to be $300,000 – and that’s just since May.

The Health and Human Services inspector general is reviewing all private and charter plane use by Secretary Price since he took office in January.

Let’s stipulate that it is important for cabinet secretaries and others to travel and meet with people in all parts of the country. And I understand the greater value sometimes lies in more expensive travel options that make better use of the limited resource of time. But if reports prove true that Secretary Price has taken at least 24 trips on private planes in the 35 weeks of the Trump administration (something neither he nor agency spokespeople have denied), this is a particularly egregious example of thoughtless waste.

The example of Secretary Price’s $25,000 flight from Washington to Philadelphia, leaving from Dulles Airport, demonstrates a deep lack of consideration for taxpayers. Philadelphia is a 90-minute train ride from Washington D.C., and the trains leave once an hour from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. It’s also a 2.5 or 3-hour drive; if Price hired a driver, he’d have privacy to use his time on phone calls or other business. Dulles Airport is a 40-minute drive from the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters, and the flight time is approximately an hour. Arguably Price wasted his own time as well as the taxpayer’s money.

Price is not alone in this administration in his questionable use of travel.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and his wife famously took a military plane to a luncheon and tour of Fort Knox – coincidentally on the same day and time of the totality of the solar eclipse. There are a half a dozen non-stop flights from Washington to Louisville every day. The secretary would have to be traveling with a 20-person entourage on commercial flights to even approach the $10,000-an-hour cost of a C-37 plane, which is a Gulfstream executive jet. Mnuchin also reportedly took a C-37 from New York to Washington this summer; there are quite literally flights every half hour from New York to D.C. The Treasury Department’s inspector general is also investigating these and other travel costs. Finally, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is under investigation from that agency’s inspector general for improper use of travel to spend time in his home state of Oklahoma; records show that in the 92 days of March, April and May, Pruitt spent 42 days in Oklahoma, almost all at the taxpayers’ expense.

Of course Price and this administration are not the first public officials to push the limits of reasonable travel costs.

In the Obama administration, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reimbursed the taxpayers $17,000 for his almost-weekly trips back to his home in California, a fraction of the cost to the taxpayers since the secretary of defense is required to travel on a secure government plane. Bush administration Health and Human Services secretary Michael Leavitt was chastised for using private planes – or the Center for Disease Control planes reserved for retrieval of specimens, medicine transport and personnel deployment – a practice he stopped once it was reported by an Atlanta paper.

But let us be clear – this behavior is outside of the norms.

Those of us who live in Washington and travel are used to seeing all sorts of policymakers in the airport and on trains. It is not uncommon to see senior members of the White House staff sitting in the cheap seats of narrow 757s or Amtrak.

The money involved may not be enough to close the deficit or significantly reduce the debt, but this problem is more than symbolic. Three cabinet secretaries are under investigation for waste and abuse of the resources of the agencies they lead, and we are not even a year into this administration. This speaks to a lack of oversight, or leadership or judgment. We need the leadership of every agency to take seriously their role in carefully managing the resources of their agency.As taxpayers we are owed nothing less.