What's going on with the Executive Departments

[GreyhoundFan]

SMDH: "EPA buys Pruitt a special booth for secret communications"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is spending nearly $25,000 to provide Administrator Scott Pruitt something none of his predecessors have had — a custom soundproof booth for making private phone calls.

EPA did not respond to questions on Wednesday from The Associated Press about the government contract for the “privacy booth for the administrator” ordered last month, according to a summary of the contract listed in a federal procurement database. The contract for the booth, due for delivery by Oct. 9, was first reported by The Washington Post.

EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman told the newspaper that the booth would serve as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, known as a SCIF, which are secure rooms used to house computers and equipment for communicating over classified government networks.

“Federal agencies need to have one of these so that secured communications, not subject to hacking from the outside, can be held,” Bowman said.

But former EPA officials told AP that explanation doesn’t make much sense.

There is already a SCIF at EPA headquarters in Washington where officials with the appropriate levels of security clearance can go to access classified information. EPA employees rarely deal with government secrets. The agency does occasionally receive, handle and store classified material because of its homeland security, emergency response and continuity missions.

Stan Meiburg, who served as EPA’s acting deputy administrator until earlier this year, said he only ever needed to enter a SCIF a handful of occasions each year.

“It’s a head scratcher, for sure,” Meilburg said of Pruitt’s cone of silence. “I’m having trouble figuring out what could be the possible business case for this.”

The booth ordered for Pruitt is being built by Acoustical Solutions, a Richmond, Va.-based company that sells more economical versions retailing for about $5,000, designed for people taking hearing tests. The company’s president, Joe Niemann, declined to discuss what modifications were being made for Pruitt’s special order.

“We shouldn’t talk about our customers,” Niemann said.

Liz Purchia Gannon, who worked as EPA’s chief spokeswoman during the Obama administration, called Pruitt’s purchase “bizarre.”

“It seems like the height of paranoia,” Purchia Gannon said. “As someone who spent a lot of time in the administrator’s office, I can tell you that there was nothing like this previously.”

I wish we could seal him in the booth and ship it to the deserted island we frequently discuss.

[GreyhoundFan]

More about our buddy Pruitt: "EPA’s Pruitt took charter, military flights that cost taxpayers more than $58,000"

Spoiler

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has taken at least four noncommercial and military flights since mid-February, costing taxpayers more than $58,000 to fly him to various parts of the country, according to records provided to a congressional oversight committee and obtained by The Washington Post.

“When the administrator travels, he takes commercial flights,” EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said Wednesday, explaining that the one charter flight and three government flights were due to particular circumstances.

The EPA provided documents that outlined how its Office of General Counsel had given legal authorization for each trip. “The administrator, and any Cabinet secretary, is the face of that agency. They’re very outward facing, and we have an obligation to get out throughout the country,” Bowman said.

The most expensive of the four trips came in early June, when Pruitt traveled from Andrews Air Force Base to Cincinnati to join President Trump as he pitched a plan to revamp U.S. infrastructure. From there, the administrator and several staff members continued on a military jet to John F. Kennedy airport in New York to catch a flight to Italy for an international meeting of environmental ministers. The cost of that flight was $36,068.50.

The EPA said in travel documents that the White House had approved the trip and that “no viable commercial flights” would have allowed Pruitt to make his plane to Italy, where he had “scheduled meetings with Vatican officials the next day.” His official calendar listed meetings with the Vatican foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, and a roundtable discussion with the Italian Court of Appeals.

On July 27, records show, Pruitt and six staff members arranged a flight on a Department of Interior plane from Tulsa to the tiny outpost of Guymon, Okla., at a cost of $14,434.50. The EPA noted that “time constraints” on Pruitt’s schedule wouldn’t allow him to make the 10-hour round-trip drive. The purpose of the trip was to meet with landowners “whose farms have been affected” by a controversial rule regulating water bodies in the United States, according to the agency. Pruitt has initiated a process to withdraw the regulation, known as the Waters of the United States rule.

Bowman said that between 50 and 100 farmers and others from Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas attended the session in Guymon.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) listed details on the noncommercial flights in a Sept. 26 letter to the EPA’s inspector general. Whitehouse, whose office would not comment Wednesday, asked for an investigation into the Guymon trip. Pruitt returned to Oklahoma City around 2 p.m., records show. EPA officials informed Whitehouse that he met there with state officials, though Pruitt’s calendar lists only an “editorial board meeting” and “media interview” at 4 p.m. that day.

Pruitt and three staff members arranged a private air charter on Aug. 4, on a trip from Denver to Durango, Colo. The flight cost $5,719.58. According to the EPA, the commercial flight Pruitt had planned to take “was delayed ultimately for eight hours, which would have caused him to miss a mission critical meeting at Gold King Mine” with Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) and other officials. Hickenlooper offered a seat on his plane, but Bowman said that the governor’s aircraft only had room for Pruitt and that the EPA already had booked the private plane by then. The charter company involved, Mayo Aviation, bills itself as “Colorado’s premier jet charter service.”

That day, Pruitt criticized how two years earlier EPA had mishandled operations at the Gold King Mine, where the agency inadvertently triggered a spill that polluted rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. “The previous administration failed those who counted on them to protect the environment,” he said in a statement, vowing to reconsider claims for damages the government previously had denied.

Finally, on Aug. 9, Pruitt and two staffers traveling in North Dakota flew on a state-owned plane to an event in Grand Forks. The flight cost the EPA $2,144.40. “The Governor of the State of North Dakota offered seats on the state-owned plane to transport the Administrator to this event,” the agency noted in its justification for the trip, which involved touring the University of North Dakota’s Environmental Research Center. “There is no government rate established for this route.”

The records also indicate that Pruitt, along with a member of his security detail, flies either in business or first class when those seats are available on commercial flights. Multiple EPA travel documents state that Pruitt “is entitled to business class accommodation due to security concerns.”

Bowman said that while Pruitt flies in such classes when that is an option, he has also flown on multiple occasions in coach.

Senator Thomas R. Carper (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, questioned in a statement why Pruitt would rely on noncommercial aircraft to travel for his work.

“Most people can’t lease a plane to fly around,” Carper said. “I think as a public servant, you have to try to set some sort of example.”

Last month, the EPA’s inspector general announced that it would launch a preliminary probe into Pruitt’s travels to Oklahoma. The internal watchdog said the inquiry was triggered by “congressional requests and a hotline complaint, all of which expressed concerns about Administrator Pruitt’s travel — primarily his frequent travel to and from his home state of Oklahoma at taxpayer expense.”

The probe was triggered in part by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit group that found through public records requests that Pruitt had spent nearly half of the days in March, April and May in Oklahoma.

“Administrator Pruitt’s extensive travel to Oklahoma, and expensive travel within Oklahoma, suggests disproportionate attention to his home state,” Whitehouse wrote, adding that the inspector general should add the Guymon visit to his probe and examine why six staffers accompanied Pruitt there. “As part of your review, I further request you examine whether this trip, and the size and composition of his entourage, is consistent with the travel expenditures of prior EPA administrators.”

I guess none of these bozos is capable of flying commercial, especially (gasp) coach. I bet if it was their money on the line, things would be different.

[GreyhoundFan]

A good snarky one from Dana Milbank: "Of course Tom Price shouldn’t have to fly coach!"

Spoiler

For Tom Price, the price is right.

The fake-news media is attacking our hard-working secretary of health and human services. First, those losers at Politico reported that Price took $60,000 in charter flights, including a $25,000 flight to Philadelphia, apparently at taxpayer expense. Politico pointed out that a train to and from Philly cost $72.

The clear implication: Price is not worth the additional $24,928 of taxpayer money. Wrong!

Sure, a train would have gotten him there nearly as quickly. But we can’t have the nation’s top health official risking an unhygienic Amtrak bathroom.

Now, Politico is reporting that Price took a government-funded private jet to a resort in Georgia where he owns land, and to Nashville, where his son lives. As if there’s something wrong with this.

It’s impossible for Price to fly commercial, because that could expose him to the unwashed masses — and nobody wants a repeat of what happened in West Virginia when a reporter had to be arrested for asking Price a question. Also, as one of the lower net-worth individuals in President Trump’s Cabinet (only $14 million, so little he can’t afford to dye his eyebrows gray to match the rest of his hair), Price needs the subsidized travel, just as he needed to enhance his meager congressional pay by trading stocks of health-care companies that had interests in legislation he pushed.

The persecution of Trump officials by the media does not stop with Price. They carp about Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin trying to use a government plane for his European honeymoon and flying on a government plane with his wife to Kentucky on solar-eclipse day. They natter about EPA chief Scott Pruitt securing round-the-clock security for himself as he shrinks the rest of the agency and having a $25,000 soundproof booth built in his office. (The noise of fired bureaucrats cleaning out desks can be quite distracting.) They moan about Trump officials using their offices to promote Ivanka Trump’s shoes and Mnuchin’s “Lego Batman” movie. They whine about the hundreds of millions of dollars being paid to Trump properties by foreign countries, the Pentagon, the Secret Service and more.

The critics just don’t get it. For America to dream big, its leaders must live large. Rich people are the smartest people, and to lure the best into government service, you have to entice them — with more riches. Besides, after Mnuchin gets Trump’s tax cut through Congress, all Americans will be able to afford charter planes.

It is time that we drain the swamp of “watchdogs” at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Send those namby-pambies back to Nambia.

Few appreciate the sacrifice these public servants make. “Dude U have no idea!” Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb wrote in an email to a restaurateur who was worried about losing his health insurance. “I walked away from $4 million annually to do this, had to sell my entire retirement account for major capital losses.”

The horror! This is why I’m not worried about Trump officials taking taxpayer-funded gratuities.

I have no objection to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos being guarded by U.S. marshals for an extra $1 million a month or so. With grizzly bears attacking public schools, it’s only a matter of time before they go after her.

I think the EPA’s inspector general should mind his own business and stop probing those government-funded trips that took Pruitt home to Oklahoma for 43 days over three months.

I’m not troubled by Trump White House official Christopher Liddell meeting with CEOs of 18 companies in his personal stock portfolio.

I don’t believe it’s anybody’s business that former national security adviser Michael Flynn was getting money from Russia.

I don’t lose sleep over Jared Kushner’s family using his Trump ties to lure Chinese real estate investors.

I’m okay with China granting copyrights to Ivanka’s fashion brand on the same day the Chinese and American presidents dined.

I don’t care if Trump releases his tax returns; or if he divests himself of his businesses; or if he touts his properties during official appearances; or if federal political committees spend lavishly at the Trump properties; or if Trump’s administration is paying Trump’s businesses for space at his properties; or if foreign powers splurge at D.C.’s Trump International, leased to Trump by the federal government.

I’m with Mnuchin’s wife, actress Louise Linton, who posted a social media photo of her getting off a military jet. Her caption noted her Hermès scarf, Tom Ford sunglasses and Valentino shoes. When one taxpayer complained, Linton shot back: “Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband?”

Exactly!

It is high time we held government to a lower standard.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Zinke says his workers are disloyal. They say his personnel moves break the law."

Spoiler

As Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blasted many within his department for being disloyal to the Trump administration’s agenda this week, the agency’s inspector general’s office continued a probe into whether officials acted inappropriately when they abruptly reassigned dozens of senior workers.

Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall is working “to determine if the U.S. Department of the Interior followed appropriate guidelines and best practices in the reassignment of Senior Executive Service employees,” according to spokeswoman Gillian Carroll.

The reassigned workers include Joel Clement, a climate scientist who was removed from his job as director of policy analysis and reassigned to a revenue accounting position for which he has no experience. Clement became a whistleblower when he publicly complained about his switch from his longtime role, in which he assessed climate impact on Alaska Native communities.

Zinke’s comments about disloyalty, coupled with the inquiry into the possible wrongful dismissal of career workers, are indications of the deep divide between Interior’s leadership and staff.

The Trump administration’s goal to allow more coal mining, drilling and logging on public lands clashes with that of scientists and others at the agency who study the impact of fossil fuels and deforestation on global warming. The mission of other offices within Interior is to ensure that taxpayers get a fair share of royalties from mineral excavation and that corporations pay the cost of restoring land disrupted during mining, drilling and logging operations.

During a speech Monday to oil and gas executives, Zinke vowed to shift policymaking decisions in the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Reclamation away from Washington and to Western states. The BLM controls 245 million acres on the surface — a tenth of all the land in the United States — as well as 700 million acres of the nation’s mineral-rich underground.

Zinke is also seeking to reduce staffing by up to 4,000 workers as a cost-cutting measure in line with the president’s proposed fiscal 2018 budget. In a Senate hearing in June, he said reassignment is one of the tools he’ll use to meet budgetary goals. Interior declined to respond when asked if another round of reassignments is imminent — a rumor making its way through the department.

Clement said Interior officials never discussed his reassignment with him before he received a notice in June.

“He believes . . . that the administration targeted him because he was speaking out about the danger [of climate change] to Alaska Native Communities,” said attorney Katherine Atkinson, who is representing Clement. “As a result, they labeled him as a climate guy.”

Beyond how the reassignments were carried out — which Atkinson said violated the U.S. Code — “it’s a waste of government money to just arbitrarily move people around in the hopes that they will quit,” she said.

Senior Executive Service members are appointed by the heads of agencies based on their job qualifications and serve at their pleasure. They can be reassigned at any time, but first certain steps must be taken, according to the rules.

A sub-chapter of the code says that “a career appointee may be reassigned to any senior executive service position only if the career appointee receives written notice of the reassignment at least 15 days before the effective date of such reassignment.”

The code continues: a career appointee “may not be reassigned . . . outside the career appointee’s commuting area” unless the agency consults with the worker, explains the reason for the move and engages the worker on his or her preferences for the next job.

In absence of a face-to-face meeting or, presumably, a telephone call, the individual should receive a written notice of the reassignment “with a statement of the reasons for the reassignment, at least 60 days before the effective date of the reassignment.”

Clement and several other career appointees say none of that happened. The other reassigned employees asked for anonymity because of fears of retaliation.

One reassigned executive who declined to be named said she found out when one of her superiors was handed a blue envelope containing six names, including hers. “Within an hour I got an official letter giving me a week to accept” her new assignment, she said.

Another staffer called the news a “shock to the system” that would require a move to Washington from a post hundreds of miles away.

“I think under any other administration there would have been a conversation about your value to the organization and why they’re moving you where they’re moving you,” the staffer said Tuesday.

The executive, who has worked under three administrations, said the current one is more aggressive about targeting employees who fall out of favor for whatever reason. “They will come after you,” the individual said.

But the question to be resolved is whether Interior broke the rules. “If the criteria expressed in the U.S. Code is not followed, then the reassignment would be unlawful,” Carroll said.

She could not say when the probe will be finished since “every evaluation or investigation or audit is different.”

I hope Zinke gets smacked for this.

[candygirl200413]

I feel like I already posted screaming in my pillow but I'm doing it again cause Puritt

[GrumpyGran]

12 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

I feel like I already posted screaming in my pillow but I'm doing it again cause Puritt

That guy is straight-up paranoid. Who needs a sound-proof booth in their office? What are you talking about, you're not the head of the CIA. He couldn't be anymore transparent about his intentions if he put a sign on the door that said "Office of the Guy Who's Trying to Destroy the Country for Profit."

[onekidanddone]

Federal employees honored at gala get Trump’s praise

Quote

It was good, if ironic, to see a top appointee of President Trump give his greetings to a formal banquet honoring federal employees, particularly given the disrespect, disappointment and dismay his administration has heaped on the workforce.

“I am honored to serve alongside you in government and have a great appreciation for your important contributions on behalf of the American people,” a tux-clad Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the 2017 winners of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, a.k.a. Sammies.

Almost 600 people were gathered in the neoclassic Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, with its 60-foot ceiling surrounded by fluted columns, on Constitution Avenue NW. Now reading a letter from Trump, Mulvaney said, “We are grateful for all of our nation’s hard-working federal employees and their continued commitment to serving our country.”

Unfortunately, that gratitude was not reflected in Trump’s plan to cut federal retirement benefits that would seriously devalue the 1.9 percent pay raise they are scheduled to receive next year. Gratefulness certainly was not demonstrated by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who this week accused 30 percent of his staff of disloyalty. The appreciation Mulvaney expressed was not shown in the budget proposal he prepared that would cut staffers and undermine agencies’ missions, nor by the failing grades he earned, as a representative from South Carolina, on federal union scorecards.

That aside, everyone took the words of Trump and Mulvaney at face value. It was a celebration of federal servants, whose devotion to mission is unflinching and inspiring, no matter what the political circumstances. There was no talk of draining the swamp.

“Our democracy depends considerably on a well-functioning government with the best people,” said Max Stier, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, the nonprofit that sponsors the Sammies. “And the accomplishments of tonight’s winners should engender trust and confidence in our federal workforce.”

Earlier this week, we listed the winners and their achievements. Today we learn more about the honorees and get their thoughts.

Federal Employees of the Year: Phillip A. Brooks, Byron Bunker and Joshua H. Van Eaton, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Justice Department team. Their work led to $17.4 billion in legal settlements following a Volkswagen scheme to evade U.S. auto emission standards.

Bunker, of Ann Arbor, Mich., has been with EPA for 18 years. “In the end, the tangible public health benefits of EPA programs are the most rewarding aspect of our work.  We frequently hold public hearings on new environmental policies and hear very personal stories … that invariably renew my focus on why we do our work and the relevance of it in the day-to-day lives of real people.”

Brooks, a fed since 1987, works at EPA headquarters in Washington. “The settlement made clear to the world that the United States will not tolerate purposeful evasion of its environmental rules.”

Van Eaton, of Arlington, has been with Justice since 2008. “I consider my work enforcing and upholding the rule of law as a Department of Justice attorney to be a special privilege and a solemn responsibility.”

Career Achievement Medal: Tedd V. Ellerbrock, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, will be 71 Friday and is the oldest winner. He was instrumental in providing assistance to millions around the world living with HIV and AIDS. “For nearly 50 years, I have been pursuing that vision (to get medicine to poor countries), and my career at CDC … has helped me finally achieve the vision. The only part of my career that I regret is that someday I will probably have to retire … I cannot imagine any activity that will be as enjoyable and rewarding as my involvement in this effort.”

Science and Environment Medal: Rory A. Cooper, with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Pittsburgh, designed innovations that provide increased mobility for veterans with disabilities. “The most rewarding part of my career is seeing the impact of our work on veterans, their families and people with disabilities.”

Homeland Security and Law Enforcement Medal: Timothy P. Camus, with the Internal Revenue Service office in the District, and the IRS Impersonation Scam team shutdown a massive fraud that had 10,000 Americans pay $54 million in bogus tax bills. “Our team made an impact by using every possible approach to protect innocent people from being victimized by criminals who were impersonating the IRS. … The key was to educate people so they did not become victims in the first place.”

National Security and International Affairs Medal: Alex Mahoney of Washington, and the Agency for International Development Middle East Crisis Humanitarian Response team, helped provide water, food and medicine to 7 million people in Iraq and Syria. “Working for the federal government is the best career choice I could have made. … We are saving lives.”

Promising Innovations Medal: Flora “Mackie” Jordan, 28, of the Marine Corps Systems Command in Quantico, Va., and the youngest winner, developed body armor that is significantly lighter, can be better adjusted to individuals and is as protective as heavier gear. “The most rewarding part is working with the Marines and being able to provide them with something that improves their ability to do their mission and just makes their lives a little bit easier/less painful.”

Ironic much? Trump and is merry band of evil handing out medals to loyal hard working employees and stabbing them in the back at the same time. Bet you next year he will be giving Bannon, Ivanka and Pruitt.

[NCLunaLovegoodFan]

Tom Price took military jets to Europe, Asia

 

This is the same HHS Secretary that believes that good healthcare would be wasteful to the government. Presidunce refused to say that he had confidence in Price.

I hope he goes down for this. Karma's a tough cookie

[onekidanddone]

15 minutes ago, NCLunaLovegoodFan said:

This is the same HHS Secretary that believes that good healthcare would be wasteful to the government. Presidunce refused to say that he had confidence in Price.

They all need to be drained from the swamp that Orange shit for brains built.

[candygirl200413]

In my fundamentals of public health class my professor had a presentation on health's role in the government so she obviously had price's face on it and I made an audible disgust that made her laugh cause that's how my body reacts.

This random person on twitter tweeted about how he's annoyed "liberals" are made that Price is only paying like 35k of the 400k he spent, saying how he has been one of the best social conservatives in DC like WHAT?!

[GreyhoundFan]

More fun with Price: "Tom Price Wanted To Reopen His Department's Executive Dining Room, Sources Say"

Spoiler

Tom Price, the Health and Human Services secretary currently under fire for his private jet travel, asked a White House official within the first two months of the administration to let President Trump know that he wanted to reopen his department's executive dining room, according to a source with knowledge of the request.

A separate source confirmed Price's interest in "reconstituting" the executive dining room more recently. The room had been closed as a dining room for top officials since the George W. Bush administration.

The White House referred questions to HHS. Asked about Price's desire to reopen the executive dining room, HHS Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs Charmaine Yoest said she didn't know about the request and could not comment. But she did note that HHS is currently expanding its cafeteria options in a new space on the facility's sixth floor, which is also home to the executive dining room space. Yoest did not respond to follow-up phone calls.

An HHS official added that staff at the department frequently complain about the cafeteria's limited dining options, between a Starbucks and a Potbelly sandwich shop. Asked about the cafeteria remodeling, the official said expanding the space involves adding tables and bringing in greater cafeteria options, like sandwiches for purchase aside from what is available in the eighth-floor cafeteria.

The executive dining room space could be part of the area currently hosting HHS's new cafeteria options. But if it's reopened as the executive space, it would traditionally not be something that department staff would get to regularly enjoy the perks of.

Asked about this story on Fox News Thursday night, Price denied that he had wanted to reopen the executive dining room, but said the department did "reopen a dining room for both the political and the career folks within the department on a different floor so they have more options to eat lunch and to chat and work during lunch." It is not clear what other dining room he could be referring to, and HHS did not immediately return a request for comment.

Executive dining rooms are used by some cabinet secretaries for lunches and business meetings, and they come with an executive chef.

During the Obama years, there was an executive chef at HHS with an office in the kitchen on the sixth floor who would occasionally make lunch for the secretary, a former Obama official said. The source, who served for Obama HHS secretaries Kathleen Sebelius and Sylvia Mathews Burwell, said that the department had however decided not to reopen the executive dining room, deeming it an unnecessary expense.

"They were figuring out ways to cut the budget internally, and that was an added expense that was not needed," the source said, adding that during Obama's presidency, the room was used as a conference space for meetings and parties.

A separate Obama HHS official said both Obama HHS secretaries generally ate lunch in their offices, and when they hosted guests for meals, they usually did so in their private conference room.

While it is unclear if Price will go forward with reopening the executive dining room, the sources with knowledge of his earlier interest in doing so said his interest alone was another unforced error for the head of a department that was supposed to cut costs by almost 18%, according to Trump's proposed budget.

Republicans said that while opening and operating an executive dining room wouldn't make a dent in the department's overall budget, the optics are rough for Price on the heels of Politico reports that he took more than 25 flights on corporate jets since May, and with Republican-led health care efforts failing in Congress yet again. Price apologized Thursday afternoon for his use of taxpayer-funded private planes and said he would "write a personal check" to the Treasury for his travel expenses on private charter planes.

"As a populist movement, the Trump movement should never make it look like government officials are crossing the line for self-aggrandizement or trying to use their position to facilitate a luxurious lifestyle for air travel or meals at the expense of the taxpayer," said a source close to the administration. "We have to be extra careful on stuff like this if we're going to market ourselves as a movement of working-class Americans."

"They're making a ton of cuts, the world is falling apart, and Price is on private planes and wants to open an executive dining room," said one of the sources with knowledge of the request, who served on the Trump campaign and transition team.

The source who said Price wanted White House aides to mention his interest in the executive dining room to the president said Price is hurting the administration.

"He's such a fucking hypocrite," said the source, who has advised Trump in the past. "We were always the people slamming Obama and his staff for doing stuff like this."

GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak said Price's jet travel and interest in an executive dining room, when informed of it, appeared "tone deaf."

"My guess is that it's a rounding error, budget-wise," he said. "But it's more about the symbolism of it than about the actual hard dollars."

The second Obama HHS official said there had been discussion during the Obama administration about renovating the dining room to be a more functional meeting and office space, since it was a large space close to the secretary's office that was underused, but the plan never moved forward. The idea was "certainly not to renovate to make it nicer for the secretary's personal enjoyment," the source added.

Previous presidents have zeroed in on limiting executive dining rooms. Early in his first term, former President Bill Clinton boasted about Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich's decision to not use his.

"When I took office, the Labor Department had a nice executive dining room for its secretary but not enough money to train unemployed workers," Clinton told the Washington Post at the time. "I am going to propose a package that has some more money to train unemployed workers, and the secretary of labor is now eating in the dining room with the employees."

The Washington Post, though, found there was "no connection between the Labor dining room and training funds."

Some departments, like the defense or commerce departments, continue to hold meetings and lunches at their own facilities to cut down on costs, rather than getting cars and security to head to restaurants off-site.

But the first former Obama HHS official said it was the last administration's calculation that "we don’t have those kinds of external meetings or a need to have meals with them, so we cut it to save those dollars."

Maybe he should make his lunch or bring in a Lean Cuisine from home.

[GreyhoundFan]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand another one: "VA chief took in Wimbledon, river cruise on European work trip; wife’s expenses covered by taxpayers"

Spoiler

Nearly three days into a trip to Europe this past July, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin had attended a Wimbledon championship tennis match, toured Westminster Abbey and taken a cruise on the Thames.

The 10-day trip was not entirely a vacation. Shulkin was in Europe for meetings with Danish and British officials about veterans’ health issues.

Yet he and his wife spent about half their time sightseeing, including shopping and touring historic sites, according to an itinerary obtained by The Washington Post and confirmed by a U.S. official familiar with their activities. 

Shulkin’s six-person traveling party included his acting undersecretary of health and her husband, his chief of staff and another aide, the itinerary says. They were accompanied by a security detail of as many as six people.

The agency said Friday that the government paid airfare for Merle Bari, Shulkin’s wife, because she was traveling on “approved invitational orders.” The government also provided a per diem for her meals, the agency said.

While some Trump administration Cabinet members have faced scrutiny over their use of private and government jets, Shulkin traveled on a commercial flight, seated in coach on at least one leg.

The European visit, however, puts a focus on the mixing of business and leisure during these trips, which can come at great taxpayer expense. Shulkin’s immediate predecessor, Robert McDonald, took no foreign work trips, according to a former VA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Shulkin’s trip came less than two weeks after he signed a memo instructing top VA staffers to determine whether “employee travel in their organization is essential.”

“I expect this will result in decreased employee travel and generate savings within the Department of Veterans Affairs,” Shulkin wrote.

In response to questions from The Post, VA announced Friday that the agency will begin posting details of the secretary’s travel online, including itineraries, and disclosing any use of government or private aircraft. That information had not previously been disclosed publicly.

All of Shulkin’s activities on the European trip, including his attendance at Wimbledon, “were reviewed and approved by ethics counsel,” VA press secretary Curt Cashour said in an emailed statement.

“These were important trips with our allies to discuss best practices for taking care of veterans,” Cashour said. “The secretary has been transparent on his down-time activities that were similar to what he would have done with his family over a weekend in the U.S.”

Cashour said the husband of Poonam Alaigh, the acting undersecretary for health, paid his own expenses.

In an interview Friday, Alaigh defended the trip as a “tremendous and valuable exchange of ideas” with British and Danish counterparts.

“Were there some breaks we got? Sure,” she said. “But they were reasonable. They were not at the expense of what we had committed to do: representing our country and showing our commitment to veterans.”

Alaigh said the delegation took an unplanned trip across the border to Sweden one evening.

Senior members of Congress, including two key Republicans, have also expressed concerns about travel by officials in the Trump Cabinet. The leaders of the House Oversight Committee, Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), wrote to the White House this week to demand records on air travel for executive officials since Donald Trump’s inauguration, saying that official travel “by no means should include personal use.”

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also wrote Trump a letter Thursday asking what steps the administration has taken to “ensure Cabinet secretaries use the most fiscally responsible travel in accordance with the public trust they hold.”

One ethics expert said the trip sends the wrong message to taxpayers, especially if the spouses’ expenses were paid by the government.

“That’s kind of a long trip for the secretary to be gone,” said Walter M. Shaub Jr., a vocal critic of the Trump administration who resigned in July as the federal government's top ethics watchdog. “The cost has got to be extravagant.”

Shulkin was invited to attend a July 19 conference in London with representatives of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In past years, the conference has regularly been attended by the VA secretary.

Also, he arranged to attend an earlier series of meetings in Denmark from July 12 to 14. Officials in Denmark said VA officials approached them about the meetings.

The bookend events left him with four days in between with no daytime business, according to his itinerary. He attended a ceremony one night at which a British veteran of the war in Afghanistan was honored, and a meeting the next night at the British prime minister’s residence.

It is not clear whether the London invitation came before or after the scheduling of the events in Copenhagen, which included speaking with several Danish health-care executives at a luncheon organized by a Danish business group. A spokesman for one company in attendance, Leo Pharma, said the CEOs were asked by the Danish Foreign Affairs Ministry to attend.

In any event, the Copenhagen meetings occurred at a time the business group said was inconvenient because it was a holiday period for Danes.

“It was quite difficult for us to accommodate,” said Kasper Ernest, a director at the Confederation of Danish Enterprise, noting that his group’s chief executive could not attend. “I was also on holiday.”

The Wimbledon event was one of the prized moments of the tennis year: In the ladies’ final, American Venus Williams would lose her chance at a sixth title to Spain’s Garbiñe Muguruza.

Shulkin and his entourage also visited four palaces — Copenhagen’s Christiansborg and Amalienborg and London’s Buckingham and Kensington — and included times for walks, self-guided tours and photo stops. 

On one calendar item, a canal tour of Copenhagen, the itinerary specifically noted the group “Will See Little Mermaid Statue,” one of the city’s most iconic public artworks. During the London visit, Shulkin and his wife shared a meal at a restaurant overlooking a tennis court with Victoria Gosling, a British leader of the Invictus Games, a sports tournament for wounded veterans. Gosling posted a photo of the gathering on Twitter. 

“Great honour and a pleasure to host US Secretary of the VA and his lovely family,” Gosling wrote.

Representatives at the Sage Foundation, where she is a director, said she was not available for comment.

Shulkin’s relationship with Danish government leaders has grown over the past year, Danish officials said, and Denmark’s military had been heavily involved in the war in Afghanistan. 

In a statement, the Danish Embassy in Washington said it has had “a close dialogue with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for a couple of years based on the long-standing partnership between Denmark and the USA on global conflicts. Over this period, there has been a standing invitation to visit Denmark.”

Is there anyone in this administration who is not a grifter?

 

HOORAY: "Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigns after criticism for taking charter flights at taxpayer expense"

Spoiler

Tom Price, President Trump’s embattled health and human services secretary, resigned Friday amid sharp criticism of his extensive use of taxpayer-funded charter flights, the White House said.

The announcement came shortly after Trump told reporters he considered Price a “fine man” but that he “didn't like the optics” and planned to make a decision by the end of the day.

“I'm not happy, I can tell you that. I'm not happy,” Trump said as prepared to leave the White House en route to his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

In a statement, the White House said Trump would designate Don J. Wright as acting secretary. Wright currently serves as the deputy assistant secretary for health and director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

Price submitted a four-paragraph resignation letter to the White House in which he said he regretted “that the recent events have created a distraction” from the administration's objectives. “Success on these issues is more important than any one person,” he continued.

A short time later, HHS staff received a message from Price praising the staff as “dedicated, committed” and saying it had been “a great joy” to serve with them.

He closed: “Duty is Ours — Results are the Lord's!”

Price had announced Thursday that he would reimburse the government for a fraction of the costs of his flights on charter planes in recent months. An HHS official said Price would write a check for $51,887.31, which appears to cover the cost of his seat on chartered flights but not those of his staffers.

Politico, which first reported on Price’s repeated use of chartered jets, has estimated the total expense of the taxpayer-funded trips exceeded $400,000 — and it reported early Thursday evening that his White House-approved flights on military planes to Africa, Europe and Asia cost more than $500,000.

Besides the charter flight issue, Trump has also directed some of his frustration at Price over the inability of Republicans in Congress to pass a health-care reform bill.

During a speech in July to a gathering of Boy Scouts, Trump said — jokingly at the time — that Price could lose his job if a bill didn’t pass.

“He better get the votes,” Trump said. “Otherwise I will say, Tom, you're fired.”

Outside the administration, Price has been a controversial figure since the time of his confirmation hearings nine months ago, but it was the revelation of his high-priced transportation for his travels as secretary that got him in trouble inside the White House.

The repeated reliance on charters, including for distances as short as between Washington and Philadelphia, contrasts markedly with the travel of his two immediate predecessors during the Obama administration.

As the reports prompted the HHS inspector general to begin an examination of the trips, the secretary initially said that he would suspend such trips until the inquiry was complete.

On Thursday, he amended that to say that he would no longer take such flights, issuing a statement in which he said that his private-charter travel had been approved by legal and HHS officials but that he regretted “the concerns this has raised regarding the use of taxpayer dollars.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who had pushed for the then-Georgia congressman to lead HHS in the Trump administration, released a statement calling Price “a good man. He has spent his entire adult life fighting for others, first as a physician and then as a legislator and public servant. He was a leader in the House and a superb health secretary.”

The ruckus prompted by the secretary’s travel habits followed complaints earlier this year by Democrats and other critics about his ethics for a separate reason: private investments he made while a House member in health-care companies that could have benefited from bills that he sponsored.

At his confirmation hearing in late January, the Senate Finance Committee’s senior Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), accused the nominee of “a conflict of interest and an abuse of position.” The main focus of such criticism involved Price’s largest stock purchase in 2016 — between $50,000 and $100,000 — in an Australian biomedical firm called Innate Immunotherapeutics.

The investment coincided with final negotiations on the sweeping 21st Century Cures bill, aimed in part at helping to accelerate clinical trials and approval of drugs like Innate’s.

Price acknowledged that the purchase, and several smaller ones he'd made in the company the previous year, occurred without an investment broker. As part of his confirmation, he testified before members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that he had learned of the company from a House colleague, Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), an Innate board member.

The 2016 investment was done through what’s known as a “private placement offering” made by a company to a select group of potential investors. Price contended that he received no insider information ahead of time.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the HELP Committee’s ranking member, reacted to Price's departure Friday by focusing on “the serious, unanswered questions about improper financial benefits.” She also faulted his approach to health care as “ideologically driven,” particularly on women’s health and reproductive rights.

“The fact that this decision took this long only indicates the extent to which the Trump Administration allows its senior officials to put themselves, and partisan politics, ahead of families and communities,” Murray said in a statement.

Other criticism of Price revolved around his uncommon reliance on campaign contributions from the health-care industry. During his 2016 campaign for a seventh House term, he accepted more than $700,000 from physicians, hospitals, drug companies and health insurers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Price’s views — abhorring the Affordable Care Act and other forms of what he regards as government intrusion into health care — fit neatly within the Trump administration’s orthodoxy. But the secretary, an orthopedic surgeon before pivoting into politics, arrived at the helm of HHS holding a variety of views that deviate from the basics of federal health policy.

He has been a longtime member of an alternative medical group called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which opposes Medicare, the highly popular government insurance for older Americans, and offers training to doctors on how to opt out of the program. The group also opposes mandatory vaccination as “equivalent to human experimentation,” a stance contrary to requirements in every state and recommendations of major medical organizations and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At his confirmation hearing, Price equivocated on the subject of vaccination, though he made positive statements about it later on.

In public speeches in the years before he became secretary, Price deplored HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — a key agency within the department he would run.

Perhaps most notably, Price as a congressman supported policies that favored his fellow physicians. He championed tighter limits on medical malpractice cases against doctors. And at his confirmation hearing, he said: “Anything that gets in the way of the patient … their families and physicians making the decisions about what kind of health care they desire . . . we ought not go down that road.”

The new acting secretary is trained as a physician and public health specialist focusing on family medicine and preventive care. Before arriving at HHS about a decade ago, Wright had extensive experience in occupational health. In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, he convened conferences designed to improve hospitals’ preparation for various kinds of disasters.

Wright has held several senior roles at the department. During the final two years of the George W. Bush administration, he was the department’s principal deputy assistant secretary for health and, in that role, also served as the alternate U.S. delegate to the World Health Organization Executive Board.

In 2012, he became the department’s deputy assistant secretary for health and director of the disease prevention and health promotion office. In February, he was named HHS’s acting assistant secretary for health.

 

[Cartmann99]

23 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“I'm not happy, I can tell you that. I'm not happy,” Trump said as prepared to leave the White House en route to his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

I bet there's some hurricane victims who'd really enjoy a weekend at a luxury golf club...

[fraurosena]

Yay...

however...

 

[Cartmann99]

*follows link in @fraurosena's post*

No, dammit, no! 

[Howl]

Another Friday resignation.  Yes, FRIDAY, the day that news goes to die.  

Puerto Rico is still in humanitarian crisis and Trump goes to play golf.  Yup, just another head-banging, face-palming day of the Trump administration.  

I must say, though, that the dismantling of these government departments is the Republican wet dream come true.  These politicians give zero fucks that citizens will suffer and there may be some hideous consequences down the line, both socially and environmentally. 

[GrumpyGran]

Hubby and I literally applauded when we heard that The Price Is Wrong was gone on the news last night. Of course whoever replaces him will be just as bad but I do think we've won a small victory for tax payers. They are pretty much in a corner with the extreme spending now. If Kellyanne Conjob gets on another private plane she will regret it when she tries to grab the spotlight again.

[GreyhoundFan]

What a tool: "Zinke calls travel controversy 'a little B.S.'"

Spoiler

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke dismissed the furor around his use of private aircraft as "a little B.S." in a speech Friday at the Heritage Foundation.

Zinke spoke less than 24 hours after revelations about his use of private planes, including a $12,000 flight from an event with a big donor to his hometown and a trip in the Caribbean. He is at least the fourth member of the Trump administration to face questions over his use of private or military planes at taxpayer expense.

“All this travel was done only after department officials determined no other flights were available,” Zinke told the audience at Heritage. “Every time I travel, I submit travel plans to the department, who determines line by line that I follow the law. And I follow the law.”

Zinke confirmed that he had taken three charter flights since being confirmed in March, but he did not go into detail about the events.

In one case, he chartered a $12,375 flight from Las Vegas to an airport near his hometown of Whitefish, Mont. Commercial flights are available between the two locations, but Interior officials said none could accommodate his schedule because he was speaking at a dinner for the Las Vegas Golden Knights, a new professional hockey team owned by Bill Foley, the chairman of Fidelity National Financial and a major Zinke backer.

Employees and PACs associated with Fidelity and associated companies gave nearly $200,000 to Zinke's campaigns, according to the campaign watchdog group Center for Responsive Politics.

Democrats and environmentalists say the trip was inappropriate, especially in the wake of Zinke's comments earlier this week questioning the loyalty of nearly a third of his employees.

“Secretary Zinke has the nerve to blow your tax dollars on easy living and then tell oil executives that a third of his own workforce isn’t loyal to the Trump administration," Rep. Raul Grijalva, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. "Loyalty to this White House means treating taxpayer money like a piggy bank. He’s the one with the ethics problems, not the employees he threw under the bus. Firing other Interior Department employees for ethical lapses is a fine step, but he needs to follow the same standards he applies to his team.”

Zinke and several other Trump cabinet members have come under fire in recent weeks for using private jets and military aircraft for official business. HHS Secretary Tom Price accrued more than $1 million in such transportation since May, saying yesterday he would personally repay a fraction of the total cost.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Wow: "The report Trump officials don’t want you to see"

Spoiler

Psst. Hey, you. Wanna read something dangerous?

It’s a government document so incendiary that the feds have tried to suppress it. They’ve purged it from their websites and disavowed its claims.

But it’s not about Roswell, or who killed JFK. It’s not even about climate change.

It’s something far juicier: a 34-page technical paper about corporate income taxes.

And it’s a document that matters if you’re trying to game out whether (and how much) enormous corporate tax cuts will trickle down to workers.

See, prior to 2008, whenever Treasury crunched the numbers on this subject, staffers assumed that corporate income taxes were borne only by owners of capital. That is: shareholders.

But toward the end of the George W. Bush administration, the non-political career people in Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis, a sort of internal think tank, began developing a new model taking into account newer research.

In 2012, they released a paper explaining their latest findings: that 82 percent of corporate taxes were borne by capital owners, and 18 percent were borne by labor. Workers don’t literally write the check, of course, but corporate taxes may discourage investment, and therefore lead to lower wages.

Figuring out who actually bears the burden of taxes, and who therefore benefits from corporate tax cuts, is thorny. We have limited data available, after all, and no true controlled experiments for changes in federal tax policy. But the answers these Treasury staffers produced are not so far from those of most other major nonpartisan tax crunchers, including the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Tax Policy Center. 

The Treasury paper was subsequently published in an elite academic journal. Outside of tax wonk circles, the numbers were generally ignored. 

Until now. 

That’s because Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been lately claiming that nearly all of the corporate tax burden is passed on to workers. It’s an argument that he has to make if he hopes to sell the administration’s tax cuts — which even a large share of Republicans opposes — as a helping hand for the Forgotten Man.

On Fox News, Mnuchin claimed that “most economists believe that over 70 percent of corporate taxes are paid for by the workers.” At an event in Kentucky, he declared that “over 80 percent of business taxes is borne by the worker.”

Tax watchers and interviewers began pointing out that Mnuchin’s claims were at odds not only with most credible estimates but also with those of his own staff.

Which clearly annoyed Mnuchin.

So Treasury took the unusual — unprecedented? — step of quietly deleting the inconvenient findings from its website.

It’s not clear when this erasure happened. The paper’s disappearance was first reported last week by the Wall Street Journal’s ace tax reporter, Richard Rubin. When I requested an interview with Treasury about the deletion, a spokesperson emailed me that “the paper was a dated staff analysis from the previous administration. It does not represent our current thinking and analysis.”

Which is a peculiar excuse, and not only because the paper was produced by nonpolitical staffers who still work at Treasury. Office of Tax Analysis models get revised all the time; that’s why this paper was produced in the first place, after all.

Updates to methodology — if that’s really all this was — do not require deletion of older technical reports, which normally stay archived online for transparency reasons. Four decades’ worth of other Office of Tax Analysis working papers somehow remain online, even though many of those have been superseded by subsequent reports.

In removing the paper, Trump officials are making it easier to conceal what their tax plan does, and whom it helps. This is part of a broader GOP effort to duck accountability.

The Senate Budget Resolution, for example, includes language that could help sideline any CBO analysis of the tax bill.

Surrogates on the Hill and executive branch have also been (somewhat incompetently) smearing the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The center recently produced a preliminary analysis of the Republican tax framework. It estimated that by 2027 the proposal would increase deficits by $2.4 trillion, with about 80 percent of tax cuts going to the top 1 percent.

Asked about these numbers on ABC’s “This Week,” Mnuchin claimed that no one can credibly estimate the effect of the plan, given how many details are still up in the air. In virtually the same breath, he also asserted that the plan will reduce deficits by $1 trillion and primarily benefit the middle class.

Those two statements can’t both be true, at least not simultaneously. 

In other words, no matter how hard Trump officials try — and as this report disappearance demonstrates, they’re trying hard — they can’t keep their own lies straight.

Lies and hiding information. Yeah, par for the course with this sham administration.

[JMarie]

On 9/30/2017 at 2:04 AM, fraurosena said:

Yay...

however...

 

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2017/09/20/rick-santorum-jimmy-kimmel-never-called-sen-bill-cassidy/

Quote

 During Tuesday night’s opening monologue, late night host Jimmy Kimmel slammed Sen. Bill Cassidy from Louisiana and the latest plan to repeal Obamacare in the Senate.

Rick Santorum, the former senator of Pennsylvania, has been helping Cassidy and Sen. Lindsey Graham from South Carolina on this proposed repeal plan.  Santorum tells The Dom Giordano Program on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT that he listened to Kimmel challenge Cassidy on the “Jimmy Kimmel Test,” and it was really disappointing.

“Bill Cassidy is a physician from Louisiana, spent 20 some years of his life in the public health clinics. He wasn’t a private practitioner serving folks in the suburbs of New Orleans making a lot of money. This is a guy who went to urban centers caring for the poor at these type of facilities. He made the pledge. Of course we’re going to make sure people with pre-existing conditions get adequate affordable health care, which, by the way, they aren’t getting right now because Obamacare is broken. The president and Congress aren’t gong to continue to prop up this broken system. There is no bipartisan support for any kind of effort to prop up Obamacare, so it’s going to continue to have higher and higher costs, and less and less quality and affordability.”

Santorum says that Kimmel never called Cassidy.

“So if you’re going to go out there and say, ‘Bill Cassidy still does this, this and this, and he made this pledge to me,’ and you don’t even bother to call him, that tells me he’s reading liberal talking points and doing liberal bidding. He’s not a serious advocate, a serious advocate for people with disabilities and pre-existing conditions. And I know something about that because I have a daughter with a preexisting condition, who has a severe disability and I want to make sure that those children and adults are covered. So serious advocates do serious works. They don’t go on television and do a comedy routine, lampooning people for things that are simply not true. I think Jimmy Kimmel owes Bill Cassidy a call. And I think if he does give him that call he’ll find out this plan is going to do a lot more to help people all over, not just people with disabilities, not just people with pre-existing conditions but people generally. You’re going to see a much better health care system across this country.”

 

 

Is Santorum implying that Trump isn't a serious advocate?  Because Trump goes on television, on a regular basis, and lampoons people for things that are simply not true.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Federal watchdog opens probe into travel by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke"

Spoiler

The inspector general for the Interior Department has opened an investigation into Secretary Ryan Zinke’s travel during seven months in office, from his use of taxpayer-funded charter and military planes to his mixing of official trips with political appearances.

Nancy K. DiPaolo, a spokesperson for Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall, described a broad investigation into Zinke’s “travel in general,” including “modes of travel, costs and schedules.”

“It’s not just one trip,” she said. “It’s seven months of travel.” She said the probe was prompted by numerous complaints from employees and the public and recent newspaper articles. Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva (Ariz.) and A. Donald McEachin (Va.), the top Democrats, respectively, on the House Committee on Natural Resources and the panel’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations, also requested an investigation.

Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander and former congressman from Montana, is one of several Trump administration Cabinet secretaries whose travel is under scrutiny. Tom Price, another former member of Congress who was Secretary of Health and Human Services, resigned Friday after taking at least $400,000 in chartered flights at taxpayer expense. The watchdog for the Environmental Protection Agency also is investigating agency head Scott Pruitt’s frequent travels to his home state of Oklahoma.

In June, Zinke and his staff chartered a four-hour private flight from Las Vegas to near his home in Montana aboard a plane owned by executives of a Wyoming oil-and-gas firm, aviation and business records show.

The flight cost taxpayers $12,375, according to an Interior Department spokeswoman. Commercial airlines run daily flights between the two airports and charge as little as $300. Zinke’s spokeswoman, Heather Swift, said no commercial flight was available that would have worked with his schedule that night.

Zinke appeared at an event held by a major campaign donor, giving a motivational speech at a dinner for the Las Vegas Golden Knights, a hockey team owned by Bill Foley, the chairman of Fidelity National Financial. Employees and PACs associated with the financial services company have given close to $200,000 to Zinke’s past congressional campaigns.

“Claims that the Secretary’s full schedule required the use of chartered aircraft deserve scrutiny,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Kendall last week. “It appears as though Secretary Zinke and his staff could have taken a commercial flight from Las Vegas to Montana if he did not attend the motivational speech to the hockey team owned by his friend and campaign contributor.”

Zinke was in the Las Vegas area that day after flying on a commercial Southwest Airlines jet from Reno, Nev., where he spoke the night before at a nearby dinner in Lake Tahoe held by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, a conservative group of attorneys general backed by the Koch brothers.

Just before the Golden Knights dinner, Zinke had appeared in the tiny rural Nevada town of Pahrump to announce a routine local funding grant from Congress to rural communities. It was one of several official trips that coincided with weekends Zinke spent at his homes in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Montana.

The secretary and his official entourage also boarded private flights between the Caribbean islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix during a three-day trip to the Virgin Islands in March, his first month on the job.

Swift said Zinke’s charter flights were authorized by ethics officials and booked only when feasible commercial flights were unavailable. She said previous interior secretaries flew charter flights when needed.

The watchdog group Campaign for Accountability also requested an investigation into whether Zinke violated the federal Hatch Act by speaking to the hockey team as part of his official duties. The act prevents executive branch employees from engaging in partisan political activity.

It is unclear whether taxpayers paid the costs of Zinke’s political appearances.

In remarks on American energy independence at the Heritage Foundation last Friday, Zinke called the media scrutiny “a little B.S.” and defended flights he has taken on military and charter aircraft since he took office.

“I believe taxpayers absolutely have a right to know about official travel costs,” he said, and listed three occasions when he used charter planes to fly to Alaska for a bipartisan trip arranged by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the flight to Montana and trips between the Virgin Islands.

Zinke did not mention the costs of those flights or whether staffers traveled with him. Zinke also said that he has flown U.S. military jets at least twice, once at the invitation of Agriculture Department Secretary Sonny Perdue and again at the invitation of President Trump.

Using taxpayer funds wisely is good government, Zinke said, but “there are times when we have to use [charter flights] as an option.”

I wouldn't mind if Zinke went down for this.

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Federal watchdog opens probe into travel by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke"

  Reveal hidden contents

The inspector general for the Interior Department has opened an investigation into Secretary Ryan Zinke’s travel during seven months in office, from his use of taxpayer-funded charter and military planes to his mixing of official trips with political appearances.

Nancy K. DiPaolo, a spokesperson for Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall, described a broad investigation into Zinke’s “travel in general,” including “modes of travel, costs and schedules.”

“It’s not just one trip,” she said. “It’s seven months of travel.” She said the probe was prompted by numerous complaints from employees and the public and recent newspaper articles. Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva (Ariz.) and A. Donald McEachin (Va.), the top Democrats, respectively, on the House Committee on Natural Resources and the panel’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations, also requested an investigation.

Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander and former congressman from Montana, is one of several Trump administration Cabinet secretaries whose travel is under scrutiny. Tom Price, another former member of Congress who was Secretary of Health and Human Services, resigned Friday after taking at least $400,000 in chartered flights at taxpayer expense. The watchdog for the Environmental Protection Agency also is investigating agency head Scott Pruitt’s frequent travels to his home state of Oklahoma.

In June, Zinke and his staff chartered a four-hour private flight from Las Vegas to near his home in Montana aboard a plane owned by executives of a Wyoming oil-and-gas firm, aviation and business records show.

The flight cost taxpayers $12,375, according to an Interior Department spokeswoman. Commercial airlines run daily flights between the two airports and charge as little as $300. Zinke’s spokeswoman, Heather Swift, said no commercial flight was available that would have worked with his schedule that night.

Zinke appeared at an event held by a major campaign donor, giving a motivational speech at a dinner for the Las Vegas Golden Knights, a hockey team owned by Bill Foley, the chairman of Fidelity National Financial. Employees and PACs associated with the financial services company have given close to $200,000 to Zinke’s past congressional campaigns.

“Claims that the Secretary’s full schedule required the use of chartered aircraft deserve scrutiny,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Kendall last week. “It appears as though Secretary Zinke and his staff could have taken a commercial flight from Las Vegas to Montana if he did not attend the motivational speech to the hockey team owned by his friend and campaign contributor.”

Zinke was in the Las Vegas area that day after flying on a commercial Southwest Airlines jet from Reno, Nev., where he spoke the night before at a nearby dinner in Lake Tahoe held by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, a conservative group of attorneys general backed by the Koch brothers.

Just before the Golden Knights dinner, Zinke had appeared in the tiny rural Nevada town of Pahrump to announce a routine local funding grant from Congress to rural communities. It was one of several official trips that coincided with weekends Zinke spent at his homes in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Montana.

The secretary and his official entourage also boarded private flights between the Caribbean islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix during a three-day trip to the Virgin Islands in March, his first month on the job.

Swift said Zinke’s charter flights were authorized by ethics officials and booked only when feasible commercial flights were unavailable. She said previous interior secretaries flew charter flights when needed.

The watchdog group Campaign for Accountability also requested an investigation into whether Zinke violated the federal Hatch Act by speaking to the hockey team as part of his official duties. The act prevents executive branch employees from engaging in partisan political activity.

It is unclear whether taxpayers paid the costs of Zinke’s political appearances.

In remarks on American energy independence at the Heritage Foundation last Friday, Zinke called the media scrutiny “a little B.S.” and defended flights he has taken on military and charter aircraft since he took office.

“I believe taxpayers absolutely have a right to know about official travel costs,” he said, and listed three occasions when he used charter planes to fly to Alaska for a bipartisan trip arranged by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the flight to Montana and trips between the Virgin Islands.

Zinke did not mention the costs of those flights or whether staffers traveled with him. Zinke also said that he has flown U.S. military jets at least twice, once at the invitation of Agriculture Department Secretary Sonny Perdue and again at the invitation of President Trump.

Using taxpayer funds wisely is good government, Zinke said, but “there are times when we have to use [charter flights] as an option.”

I wouldn't mind if Zinke went down for this.

While I'd love to see Zinke go down for this, I'd be afraid Trump would find someone who is worse for National Parks and National Monuments to fill this position. 

[GrumpyGran]

On 10/3/2017 at 11:14 AM, Audrey2 said:

While I'd love to see Zinke go down for this, I'd be afraid Trump would find someone who is worse for National Parks and National Monuments to fill this position. 

Probably but I have to try and find a silver lining these days and taking these corrupt thieves down by removing them from their dangerous positions at least sends a message that you'd better be a little more discrete and if we still catch you, you're gone.

It's not as if they have any shame, but if Zinke has to resign, he is no longer valuable to the vultures who use him to advance their agenda. They will find someone else but maybe some of this unqualified asses will think twice about taking these jobs.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is good. I can't quote, because of the notes, but it's worth a read. "In which Trump’s own secretary of state won’t deny calling him a ‘moron,’ annotated".

I, for one, wish Tillerson wouldn't insult morons by calling the orange menace one.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting opinion piece: "Stakeout at Dulles Airport launched Politico bombshell on Tom Price’s charter-flight scandal"

Spoiler

The tip about the charter-flight reliance of former health and human services secretary Tom Price came to Politico’s Rachana Pradhan in May. A reporter for the site’s subscription service, Politico Pro, she started work on the story and later invited her colleague Dan Diamond to team up on a monster reportorial task: Price’s department didn’t release previews of the secretary’s travel schedule; charter flights are tricky to track and price; they were working on a story that the authorities didn’t want to see published.

Over the course of the summer, the duo moved the story forward, though haltingly. “There were periods of probably a week or two where we just couldn’t get any more,” Pradhan said.

“We weren’t on the aviation beat,” said Diamond. “The HHS team is really tight-lipped, very private on even sharing public information about the secretary’s travel.”

Then came September. Somehow — via “reporting,” is all Pradhan would say — Politico knew enough to head over to Dulles International Airport on Sept. 15 in an effort to add some old-world eyewitness work to the project. The duo stuck together in the morning, as Price and his crew left Dulles for Philadelphia on a charter flight. They didn’t get the sort of visual evidence they’d come to gather.

So in the afternoon, for the return of the charter flight, they split up. Diamond was on his feet, at the terminal, while Pradhan drove a car along the road that hugs the charter-flight area of Dulles. As the flight was approaching landing, Diamond was “counting down” to Pradhan — an air-travel-checking website assisted them with flight information (though for other flights, Diamond said, such sites didn’t help much). The countdown from Diamond signaled to Pradhan when she should drive past the charter-flight location.

Diamond: “I was tracking on my phone and standing in the main terminal counting down when the plane would land so Rachana could drive at the appropriate time past the tarmac.” As he moved around, he spotted the SUV escort pulling up to the charter-flight area.

Pradhan: “I was in the car and I was driving and I leaned my head forward past a row of bushes.” She knew that she’d have only, like, “30 seconds” to get a clear view.

The two health-care reporters were quite familiar with Price, with his hair, with his stature and so on. “He’s got some distinguishable physical features,” Pradhan said. “He’s not just like your average Joe Schmo.”

They had it nailed.

“I saw him,” Pradhan said, noting that she couldn’t snap a photo because she was driving. Diamond said he believes he spotted Kellyanne Conway through the window of an SUV. The facts showed up in these bullet points at Politico:

• On Sept. 15, Price, accompanied by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, left Dulles aboard a charter at 8:27 a.m. and touched down at Philadelphia International Airport at 9:01 a.m. for a scheduled visit to Mirmont Treatment Center, a local addiction treatment facility.

• Also on Sept. 15, Price, Conway and other staff departed Philadelphia aboard a charter plane at 12:39 p.m. and touched down at Dulles at 1:19 p.m., where the plane was met on the tarmac by two SUVs and a police escort.

There was a great deal more to this project. Politico constructed a database seeking to piece together Price’s schedules and itineraries. To fill out that spreadsheet, it sought information from the HHS website, from organizations that hosted Price, and various other sources — though you might suppose that the government in a proud democracy like the United States would provide all that information upon request. Politico requested travel documents via the Freedom of Information Act, but hasn’t gotten the goods yet.

To piece together the cost of the domestic flights — which, ultimately, tallied about $400,000 — the reporting team checked charter company estimates as well as federal contracts, said Pradhan. As the team approached a publication date, Politico gave them more relief from their routine duties; across the Politico operation, there are 20 staffers covering health care in one capacity or another. And once they got their initial report to the public, new sources and avenues of inquiry opened up. HHS officials became more cooperative as well, providing, for example, information on Price’s travel in advance.

The story snowballed, feeding off of HHS’s explanation that Price needed private-jet travel because of his insane schedule and because he needed to get in touch with regular Americans: the mainstream media followed Politicos scoops, President Trump declared that he wasn’t happy with the revelations, and Price resigned Friday, sealing a clean coup for the 10-year-old site.

It’s a victory, too, for very narrowly focused beat reporting. Pradhan’s work for Politico Pro brings her close to the nitty-gritty of health care, and that’s where the story germinated. “This is the agency we cover, these are the people we report about whether in this context or not,” Pradhan said. “It wasn’t a White House story, it wasn’t a Congress story.” Carrie Budoff Brown, Politico’s editor, noted via email, “Our newsroom thrives because it has deeply sourced, talented journalists not only at the White House and Congress, but covering the policy apparatus and the inner workings of government throughout the agencies — in this case HHS.”

The following is an observation of the Erik Wemple Blog, not mentioned by anyone at Politico for this story: That they would be the folks who brought Price down is a moment of extraordinary investigative reportorial justice. As this blog noted with great anger back in January, Price, in his confirmation hearings, cast the most scurrilous slime on Politico. After a senator cited a Politico report from 2012 — as well as a report from Talking Points Memo — indicating that Price thought it was a terrible idea to guarantee coverage of preexisting conditions, Price attacked the media: “Oh well, now there’s a reliable source.”

Yes, quite reliable.

Speaking of which, the contemporary political environment is merciless toward misfiring investigative projects. Did Politico’s bosses take that into account? “The editorial team,” notes Brown in an email, “working hand in hand with Dan and Rachana, worked for months on this story. It was reported carefully and deliberately and as such was impervious that sort of blowback.”