Plane nonsense

President Trump’s cabinet secretaries are following the lead of their boss, who racks up huge travel bills as he jets to his golf courses and commingles personal profit and public duties like it’s nobody’s business. (It’s everybody’s business.) Last week alone, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price chartered private planes five separate times for official business — costing orders of magnitude more than commercial tickets would’ve cost.

This, staffers told Politico anonymously, is part of a months-long pattern.

The last two HHS secretaries flew commercial, as all of them should.

Nor was Price going to far-flung corners of the country. One flight, costing about $25,000, took him from D.C. to Philly. There were comparable commercial round-trip flights as low as $450 a person — not counting government discounts. Rumor has it train tracks and roads connect the cities too.

Even if you assume all 10 people who traveled with the secretary had bought seats, the spending difference is massive.

Just because Price is profligate doesn’t necessarily mean taxpayers got the bill; a third party or the secretary himself may have paid. But for now, HHS staffers aren’t answering questions, and all three of the organizations that hosted Price deny covering the cost of his travel.

This is the same Tom Price who back in 2009, as a member of the House of Representatives, postured as a protector of the public purse, calling congressmen’s use of private planes “just another example of fiscal irresponsibility run amok.”

And this is the same administration in which Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin and his new wife took a government plane, rather than flying commercial, to Kentucky for a tax-reform event on the day of the total eclipse back in August — the same month Mnuchin inquired about the use of a military plane for his European honeymoon (he was denied).

Who do these people think they are?