USA TODAY International Edition
Time to reform congressional travel
WASHINGTON Congress is flying high again — literally. Congressional expenditures on foreign travel are at their highest levels in five years, and private sponsors spent more than $ 5 million last year flying lawmakers and staff to gatherings near and far.
In theory, I think congressional travel is a good thing. When there is an earthquake in Haiti, I want members of Congress to check out how U. S. aid is being used. Lawmakers who are going to vote to send soldiers to war should travel to military bases to learn what the soldiers need. When there is a conference on security in Brussels, our lawmakers should be there.
But in practice, congressional travel often becomes entangled in a web of moneyed interests, political agendas, decadent joyriding and hidden destinations.
Having spent the past halfdozen years investigating congressional travel scandals, I have some suggestions for fixing it.
1) Make a budget. For official trips abroad, there is no budget, and Congress does not pay for the trips. They are paid for out of a taxpayer- financed Treasury Department account that automatically refills itself, so Congress never has to ask, “Can we afford this trip?” The legislators just announce they are going, and * poof* their chariot arrives. So in January, a half- dozen House members flew to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, a kind of ideas festival for economics geeks. Total cost to the taxpayers: about $ 125,000. Total contribution from congressional coffers: zero.
This official travel cost taxpayers $ 12.5 million in 2014, up from $ 9.7 million the year before and the highest total since the $ 17.9 million spent in 2009, according to Treasury Department reports. Congress should set a travel budget, and the bipartisan leadership should determine which trips should be funded.
2) Restore transparency. Members of Congress can use their office budgets to pay for travel to and from Washington ... and anywhere else they can find an “official” purpose. In the Senate, this travel is clearly disclosed, which is how my colleagues and I have been able to write about the Senate travel expenses of presidential candi- dates, including Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum.
But the House changed its reporting system in 2009 to eliminate details about travel paid for by congressional offices. Expenditure reports used to include details about who in each congressional office was traveling and where they went. That information has been eliminated; now only the cost and date of the travel is reported. This is part of the reason former representa- tive Aaron Schock, R- Ill., was able to get away with what appear to be flagrant abuses of congressional travel rules: He was not required to publicly report where he was going on the taxpayers’ dime.
The House should restore transparency and tell us where they went.
3) Swap partners. Last year, third parties spent $ 5.1 million on travel for lawmakers and staff, according to Legistorm, a service that tracks these expenses. These trips require detailed disclosure about who is paying for the travel, who is traveling, where they are going and why. But privately paid travel has an inherent conflict. If the trip is for fact- finding purposes with broad public interest, why should a private party pay for that? And if the trip is for narrower political or ideological purposes, why should the law- makers and staff go at all?
Organizations paying for congressional travel in this year alone cover an array of political, ideological, religious and ethnic zealots of various stripes. Lawmakers and staff have traveled to Israel on the dime of evangelicals who endorse scouring U. S. textbooks for anti- Christian sentiment and to Cuba with a group devoted to shifting the U. S. to “new policies that will lead us to normalization and recognition of Cuba’s government.” A prayer group brought a delegation to a “religious liberty summit” to sketch a “tactical plan to reverse the dangerous trend of censoring God,” while a liberal political group brought lawmakers to an annual conference intended to “connect Congress with the ideas and resources of the wider progressive movement.”
There is something inherently democratic about the list of travel sponsors because it so broadly spans the field of ideological fixations. But it also reinforces our lawmakers’ ideological isolation from each other if each faction travels for the purposes of reinforcing its own biases, or travels only with people who won’t challenge them.
My suggestion is this: Every private group that wants to sponsor travel for members of Congress and staff may do so. But those who can take the trip will be chosen at random. Let the evangelicals host a lawmaker who had been planning to attend the annual Progressive Congress event. It might be a better learning experience for everyone.
Congressional travel often becomes entangled in a web of interests, political agendas, joyriding and hidden destinations.