Last week, we learned that Treasury Secretary Steve "Can I borrow a government jet for my honeymoon" Mnuchin isn't the only one in the Trump administration who goes to great, taxpayer-funded lengths to avoid taking commercial flights like some kind of commoner. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, too, has all but made it a rule that he must travel via chartered planes, following a traumatic incident wherein the former congressman suffered through a flight delay. (Never again, he swore.) According to an investigation by Politico, since being confirmed, Price has taken private planes for official business at a cost of at least $400,000 to taxpayers, often for short trips like from D.C. to Philadelphia where airline tickets run in the low hundreds, and a car or train ride would have just as easily sufficed. In contrast, Price's predecessor, Kathleen Sebelius took just one private flight during her five-plus years on the job, to a remote part of Alaska that would have been otherwise unreachable.
Invoicing taxpayers to avoid even the possibility of being delayed was never going to be a great look. But for Price, the optics are especially bad because 1) he is currently working to cut billions of dollars in health-care subsidies and slash funding from the National Institutes of Health and 2) back when he was a congressman, he literally made railing against the use of private jets by government employees one of his pet causes.
And in a move that only someone brazen enough to "trade more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies . . . while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies' stocks" would pull, Politico reports that Price continued to book private jets after the initial reports on his pricey habit, taking more chartered trips last week at a taxpayer expense of $56,500.
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Unfortunately for Price, the White House has said it had nothing to do with approving the trips, and the HHS inspector general has said he will be conducting a formal review of the secretary's travel. And so Price was pressured on Saturday into announcing in an interview with Fox News that that he'll refrain from booking private planes for now. The "optics in some of this don't look good," he conceded. "I don't think there would be any charter trips until this review is complete. I think that's appropriate because of the concerns that we've heard."
On the other hand, he also thinks this whole thing is some kind of witch hunt designed to take down allies of Donald Trump. "Remember that there are folks who want to see this president fail; there are folks who want to see this administration fail," Price said. "That is part of the stream; we are swimming upstream against that kind of current, but that's not dissuading us at all."
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