Public officials tend to spend too much money on themselves and their offices. It’s an unfortunate part of the human condition—by definition public officials spend resources that don’t belong to them, and so they will often spend more than they have to. Media allegations of excessive spending by public officeholders are therefore a common—and proper—part of our public discourse.
Sometimes the allegations have merit. When President George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff John Sununu was found to have taken “official” trips to ski lodges and golf resorts, the revelation led to his resignation, and rightly so. But often there’s more to the story than an eager news media would prefer to believe. Senator Richard Nixon’s privately raised “sustaining fund,” revealed by the Washington Post in 1952, turned out to be both legal and entirely reasonable, and his famous televised “Checkers speech” in defense of his conduct made him a Republican hero. Were President Ronald Reagan’s plane trips home to California costing the taxpayer too much, as the New York Times alleged in 1981? Maybe, maybe not.
What to make of the assemblage of Trump administration cabinet officials accused of overspending? EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who had a soundproof phone booth installed at his agency at an estimated cost of $43,000, also charged taxpayers for his first-class airplane tickets. The New York Times nailed Ben Carson, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for green-lighting a dining room set at a cost of $31,000 without seeking Congressional approval (necessary for upgrades costing more than $5,000).
The Department of the Interior, meanwhile, stands accused of spending $139,000 to upgrade the double doors in the office of agency head Ryan Zinke, whose travel spending had been scrutinized last fall. David Shulkin, the secretary of the Veterans Administration, was slapped in an inspector general report in February for taking a European trip with his wife on the public dime. Last year, Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin was sharply criticized for taking a military jet to an otherwise insignificant event in Fort Knox, Ky., which happened to coincide with the solar eclipse. The former hedge fund manager’s wife, actress Louise Linton, also attended. And of course HHS secretary Tom Price resigned last September in the wake of media reports that he and staff had taken dozens of costly chartered flights, many to routine destinations with less expensive commercial travel available.
First, a word about the reporting here. We offer with all sincerity kudos to the enterprising reporters who have learned to ferret out budgetary absurdities in cabinet agencies. And we’re encouraged by their sudden attention to federal government spending. That said, we would have appreciated their talents between the years 2009 and 2017. Maybe they just couldn’t find any spending excesses in an administration that presided over a near doubling of the US national debt.
On the spending itself, the dollar amounts here are relatively insignificant in the context of the federal budget. The money isn’t the real problem. The behavior is—particularly from top officials working for a president who pledged repeatedly that he’d “drain the swamp.” The message to taxpayers is clear: We don’t care.
Even worse? The bizarre obfuscation and attempted justification of the profligacy. Pruitt suggested he had to fly first class because the “toxic environment politically” and lack of “civility” meant flying coach presented security risks. Seriously. Carson initially denied any knowledge of the expensive furniture, telling CNN in a statement he was as “surprised as anyone to find out that a $31,000 dining set had been ordered.” But an email from a department staffer to two top Carson aides subsequently released via the Freedom of Information Act, refers to “printouts of the furniture the Secretary and Mrs. Carson picked out.” Price, who eventually apologized, initially claimed his costly private flights were necessary given the demands on his time.
Our reporting suggests that Donald Trump has in mind several of these men as he considers remaking his cabinet. Trump is frustrated, our sources tell us, by these microcontroversies and what they say about his administration. He’s thinking seriously about making examples of those who’ve been poor stewards of taxpayer money.
Good for him. For whatever it’s worth, our advice to the president: Don’t make a tweet announcement during one of your exorbitantly expensive trips to Mar-a-Lago. As you said in your inaugural address: “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”
