Bolstered by a victory that caps Defense Department spending on national conferences, U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn will add similar caps to all spending bills in the coming legislative session, an aide to the senator said.
Coburn, R-Okla., has long condemned the amount the government spends traveling to and from conferences.
Last week, he amended a defense spending bill that capped the Pentagon’s domestic conferences budget at $70 million next year.
The senator said that the Pentagon sent 36,000 employees to 6,600 conferences at an average cost of $2,200 per person last year. He claimed that half of those conferences should have been conducted via videoconferencing, which would have cut costs.
The amendment capping the Pentagon’s conference spending passed last week over the objections of several senators, including Alaska Republican Ted Stevens and Hawaii Democrat Daniel K. Akaka.
The House version of the spending bill has no such cap, so there will certainly be a battle in conference next month.
Nonetheless, an aide told The Examiner on Friday that Coburn was going to try to add similar caps to every appropriations bill that comes before the Senate.
Coburn says that the government has spent $1.4 billion on meetings and travel since 2000.
“There is overwhelming evidence that bureaucrats have a ‘spring break’ mentality when it comes to business travel,” Coburn’s Web site quotes him as saying.
