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 Americaâs next secretary of state.
What wasnât 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.
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http://www.washingtonguardian.com/not-economy-class
What wasnât 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.
More
http://www.washingtonguardian.com/not-economy-class
