The Department of Transportation Inspector General’s office will be auditing Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s use of FAA aircraft. This is stupid, the Transportation Secretary often should fly private at times.
He won’t come out and say that. Instead Buttigieg maintains it was cheaper to fly private than to buy airline tickets. If that were true, his office is paying insufficient attention to the scourge of high ticket prices! (Hint: it is not actually true.)
The Transportation Department said Buttigieg made 18 flights on FAA planes over seven trips. In all but one trip, it was less expensive to use FAA aircraft than to fly commercially, Buttigieg’s office said. The cost of the flights for Buttigieg and accompanying staff was $41,905.20, according to the department.
Previous DOT secretaries have flown on agency aircraft, both Democrat and Republican. The agency reports that over the past two years:
- Buttigieg has flown 138 flight segments
- 119 of those have been commercial, and 19 on private aircraft
- Most of the private flights have been on one of three FAA 9 seat aircraft. He also “used a Coast Guard aircraft once” and “flew to Europe on a military plane to represent the administration at the Invictus Games, a contest for wounded members of the military and veterans.”
Frankly the bigger criticism is that the Secretary of Transportation is taking fewer than 70 flights a year. Someone in his role, at a bare minimum, ought to travel enough so that if it were concentrated on a single global airline would earn top tier elite status. (No information is provided by DOT on the qualifying miles earned for his commercial flights, which would generally be booked at government contract fares.)
Moreover, just like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen flying coach this is stupid, privileging performative optics over productivity.
In fact, you know just how much of a game this is when the focus is on cost but the FAA calculates the cost per hour for a Cessna Citation at $1,000 when requested by one of the DOT’s own employees, but $5,000 per hour when requested by an employee of another agency. Then they “translate[..] those hourly rates into the equivalent of a per-seat ticket cost to allow for price comparisons.”
- Hint: $1,000 is not reasonable. That’s about the cost of fuel burn alone.
Since the Secretary of Transportation is charged with ensuring safe and efficient systems of travel, and stopping unfair and deceptive practices,
- It’s good for the person in that role to travel:coach without special services or special handling from time to time
- It’s also good for them to experience premium cabin travel
- And it’s good for them to experience private aviation.
Their job literally covers all of these things!
But as a general matter you want the Secretary of Transportation working. First class isn’t a privilege, it’s the domain of middle managers. And private air travel can be a luxury but most of the time it isn’t.
Famously frugal Walmart has more corporate jets than any other U.S. company.
- Their stores are spread around the country, in many cases nowhere near airports. To visit a single store their managers would often have to connect, and often fly the night before – and perhaps spend the night after a store visit. A single store visit might take three days.
- Instead send a team of middle managers on a private jet, and visit multiple stores in a single day.
- That’s a cost-savings to the company, which gets a lot more out of expensive managers.
If you have complaints about travel that you believe the Department of Transportation should be acting on but isn’t, you presumably want to buy back more working hours from the head of the agency; more time to read briefings on your issue and more time to lay out plans and direct staff.
To be sure there are trips that a cabinet secretary probably shouldn’t take on a private jet – like Trump administration Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price billing taxpayers for a charter from Washington Dulles to… Philadelphia? And it’s not as though the time saved avoiding TSA left the nation better prepared for a pandemic. Meanwhile the excuses that the mayor of New Orleans used for buying out of coach travel are just bizarre.
He should resign.
That’s what he should do.
He should fly private, and private ONLY. Not only is it safer for him, but saver for the rest of us as well as we do not expose ourselves to any of their shenanigans.
He needs to fly any way he can to North Korea and stay there forever.
$41, 905 fr 18 private jet trips for him and his entourage? That’s $2,300 a flight. Where do i sign up?
Pete likes the sleek fuselage on private planes
“Since the Secretary of Transportation is charged with ensuring safe and efficient systems of travel, and stopping unfair and deceptive practices,”
I can’t help wondering if Gary typed that out with a straight face.
I previously did accounting for our corporation’s fleet of aircraft. In the 6+ years I did this accounting I can tell you it is less expensive to fly private than it is commercial. Yes, it is more convenient. Yes, one may be able to forgo overnight lodging. Yes, it may allow a schedule which cannot be met by commercial flights. But it is never less expensive.
For some reason the italicized “never” did not transfer. The second sentence of my previous reply should read “…it is never less expensive to fly private . . .”
Of course it’s not less expensive.
A full 737 is more cost effective than a full ERJ-145. The economics of a full ERJ-145 are better than that of a full Cessna.
If the FAA says a 9 seat Cessna costs them $1000 an hour, then a 2 hour flight costs $222 per person. That can be less than a commercial airline ticket. It’s also made up numbers.
I have nothing against Secretary Pete, but he’s a McKinsey “fire the excess bloat” full-on republican forced to be a democrat due to his sexuality but working for a heavily labor-oriented Democrat still living in a party from 30 years ago that honestly just doesn’t pull from that demographic as much.
What is the guy supposed to do? He was a mayor of a city with a clout smaller than San Bernardino that made national news off a couple debates where he sounded coherent. Of course he had to accept the job offered to him. But he has little in common with the administration he works for and therefore was always an odd pick to do anything of consequence in his position.
Remember that time pothole Pete got out of his V8 Black Suburban and took his peewee herman bike out of the back and rode the last few blocks to his office? I do.
Gary, is it a more or less routine audit? If so, I wholeheartedly disagree with your statement that it’s stupid. It is not stupid for the inspector general’s office to audit these expenses. Auditing is a normal and standard practice. It helps ensure that departments don’t waste money via frivolous expenditures or recessive use of the private flights etc.. Just because his 18 private flights are likely reasonable expenses does not make the audit stupid.
That’s like saying it’s stupid for my company to require I submit receipts with my reimbursements or that it’s stupid for the company to have regular independent audits of all our finances.
“The Department of Transportation Inspector General’s office will be auditing Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s use of FAA aircraft. This is stupid, the Transportation Secretary often should fly private at times.”
Not that I like the guy, he seems to be a bit of a slacker who’s book smart but way above his competency level, but he’s an executive – and executives should tell their assistant, “I need to go to X”, and then the staff figures out the best way for the boss to get to X and back. As long as he’s not insisting on flying a certain way and his time is being well utilized, figuring out travel plans is WAAY below his pay grade.
@Andrew – “Gary, is it a more or less routine audit? If so, I wholeheartedly disagree with your statement that it’s stupid”
It’s an audit that was implored by Senator Marco Rubio, following complaints by Senator Chuck Grassley.
Didn’t the last transportation secretary get the boot for flying private too much?
@bob dobolina – no
@bob dobolina you may be thinking of Trump’s HHS secretary (briefly) Tom Price
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/09/29/tom-prices-travels-5-things-know-scandal-cost-hhs-chief-his-job/717946001/
I’m for Sec’y Buttigieg flying the most economical way, given the nature of his trip.
What concerns me more than the few thousand dollars his flights may cost is his lack of competence and indifference to the responsibilities of his office.
His taking “paternity leave,” his failure to show up in East Palestine, OH asap after the derailing, his lies about the accident being the result of policies of or acts by the Trump administration, etc., betray a level of incompetence and indifference to the importance of turning up — to say nothing of the optics — only confirm the stupidity of and harm in Mr Biden’s policy of appointing minorities to important positions, irrespective of their ability to perform their duties effectively.
Were Mr Buttigieg a man with the sort of character we have the right to expect in cabinet officers, he’d resign, having realized that the duties and responsibilities of the Sec’y of Transportation are far above his pay grade.
But he’ll remain in his position until the end of Mr Biden’s term; for he’s on a power trip and now has more power than he’s had or is ever likely to have again.
@ Gary. I challenge you or anyone to find a 9 seat corporate/private jet (with crew of two) that charters, or has total operating expenses of $1,000 per hour! Yes, it is made up numbers.
Having personally flown on faa aircraft, they are not particularly luxurious. they are convenient when complicated travel itineraries would not allow commercial air travel. re the questions about flight costs – when an internal DOT user uses the aircraft the cost does not include paying the pilot as that is a fixed cost for the agency. for external users (other government users) the price is higher as that cost includes the hourly costs of the flight crew and factors in costs for the aircraft (a fixed cost for internal users). Its not made up numbers…
each use of the aircraft has to be reviewed by career ethics and legal civil servants at the department.
So sad that most of these comments are from homophobics with little or no intelligence