Stories about expensive presidential vacationing appeal to very few people outside reporters and political hacks. For all our belief in equality, we Americans will tolerate a touch of royalism in our presidents. Barack Obama’s travel may have cost taxpayers around $10 million a year, and Donald Trump’s regular jaunts to Mar-a-Lago will cost more than that, but outrage over presidential sabbaticals will not be widespread. Nobody cared in 1981 when the New York Times reported that Reagan’s trips to Santa Barbara were costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop (that was a lot of money in those days), just as no one was impressed when Jimmy Carter pretended to carry his own luggage on the tarmac in 1976. Kings don’t carry their own bags and neither should presidents.
But what applies to presidents doesn’t apply to their subordinates. When George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, was discovered to have used military jets for ski and golfing getaways and to have traveled via government limousine to a stamp auction at Christie’s in New York, the uproar was nationwide. He stepped down a few months later.
Two of President Trump’s subordinates have just discovered this principle. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin requested a military plane to fly him and his new wife, actress Louise Linton, on a European honeymoon. Treasury quickly withdrew the request but also suggested the reason for it was the need for secure communication during the secretary’s travels. That excuse might have persuaded, if only Mnuchin and Linton hadn’t just returned from a publicly funded trip to Kentucky, ostensibly to examine gold reserves at Fort Knox but seemingly timed to view the eclipse.
Of course, the use of a military jet was totally unnecessary, as proved by the department’s quick discovery of an alternative. That Mnuchin is a former hedge-fund manager and can presumably afford his own travel only makes his explanations more painful.
Now we discover that another cabinet member, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, has been taking chartered flights at taxpayers’ expense. It’s not obvious why Price needed chartered flights to locations easily accessible via Amtrak or commercial airline (Philadelphia; Portsmouth, N.H.; and Waterville, Maine). The agency’s explanations are expressed in the empty argot of crisis-management verbosity: “As part of the HHS mission to enhance and protect the health and well-being of the American people, Secretary Price travels on occasion outside Washington to meet face to face with the American people,” etc., etc.
What we do know is that as a congressman, which he was for 12 years, Price inveighed repeatedly against government waste—on one occasion high-mindedly grousing about a congressional attempt to buy planes for the transport of public officials. He can expect his complaints to be replayed again and again in the weeks ahead.
The perquisites of public office are a temptation at all times. Mnuchin and Price are far, far from the only Washington politicos to spend public money less carefully than they spend their own. But they work for a president who won office in part by accusing the nation’s governing elite of behaving as though public resources belonged to themselves. “For too long,” he said in his first address as president, “a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.” The people can be forgiven for thinking that some members of that group now have cabinet posts.
