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WTOP
Lawmakers
increase travel as rest of country
deals with budget cuts
By Sara Carter, John Solomon and Phillip Swarts
Thursday - 4/11/2013
While
the rest of Congress was struggling to
avoid the dreaded fiscal cliff late last year, then-Sen. John Kerry
whisked off
to London with a top aide. It was a classic farewell trip for a veteran
Democrat about to become America’s next secretary of state.
What
wasn’t classic was the cost to taxpayers:
$17,500 for two airline tickets to London that normally cost just
$3,000.
Across
the Capitol, House Majority Leader Eric
Cantor commandeered a VIP military flight and dashed off to Switzerland
with
half-dozen Republican colleagues in late January, just days after a
congressional vote to suspend the debt limit and avert another fiscal
crisis.
The jaunt - for a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos - likely
set back
taxpayers more than $50,000.
And
not to be outdone by their jet-setting
bosses, more than a dozen congressional staffers from both political
parties
took a winter trip to sunny, warm Las Vegas at the expense of special
interests
Their weighty assignment? Check out the gadgets at the city's annual
consumer
electronics expo.
While
most in Washington have been preaching
the gospel of fiscal discipline, members of Congress and their top
aides have
done little to rein in their own travel in the face of the sequester
budget
cuts and soon-approaching national debt ceiling, a Washington Guardian
review
of travel records found. In fact, they've been spending more on travel
than in
prior years.
Members
of Congress and their staffers spent
$1.45 million on official taxpayer trips in 2012, up about $230,000
from the
year before. And in the first three months of 2013, lawmakers and staff
took
another $800,000 in trips at the expense of special interests, nearly
$100,000
more than the same period last year, according to the official travel
records
compiled by Congress and stored on the PoliticalMoneyLine.com site.
It’s
enough to make some roll their eyes.
“How
lawmakers spend taxpayer funds on
themselves is a window into their budgetary soul,” said Steve Ellis,
vice
president for the nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog Taxpayers for Common
Sense.
"If they can’t be responsible with their own travel expenses, how can
we
expect them to be good stewards of the treasury as a whole?”
Confronted
by their far-reaching travel in the
midst of budget crises, congressional officials told the Washington
Guardian
they were just beginning to set new policies to rein in their travel
expenses
in the aftermath of the sequester.
“We
expect to finalize guidelines and implement
new procedures with the goal of reducing the budget,” explained
Patricia
Enright, a spokeswoman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that
sent
Kerry on his trip to England. “We’re exploring ways to save money while
ensuring members and staff have the resources they need to travel
internationally as they pursue work on committee priorities.”
The
contrast between the rhetoric calling for
government belt-tightening and the sense of entitlement on Capitol Hill
abound
in the latest travel reports. They detail millions of dollars in
privately
funded and taxpayer-paid trips over the last year, even as the U.S.
government
flirted with financial calamity in such dramas as the fiscal cliff, the
debt
ceiling and the budget sequester.
For
instance, Kerry's trip across the pond last
November with Bill Danvers, his top aide on the Senate Foreign
Relations
Committee, wracked up $17,500 in airfare alone, at least six times more
expensive than the average roundtrip coach fare to London available on
most Web
travel sites.
Kerry's
trip ran up $4,700 in other expenses,
according to his trip report to Congress, which offered no explanation
for the
travel or the high costs.
The
Senate Foreign Relations Committee said it
did not have any information on why Kerry's tickets cost so much, or
why he
even went on such a trip when he was winding down his Senate career and
preparing to join the Cabinet.
A
State Department official with knowledge of
Kerry's trip said the flight was last-minute because there was late
voting in
the Senate on Nov. 14, the day the two flew to London.
Read
the rest of the article at WTOP
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