Rubio-led group seldom meets

His office has gotten $100,000 a year for Senate task force

Since March 2013, Sen. Marco Rubio has co-chaired a Senate arms control task force that has met only three times, yet his office has accepted each year a $100,000 reimbursement for the costs of staffing the group.

A week before he was named co-chairman of the working group, Rubio was one of 11 Republican senators joining 42 Democrats to vote down a proposal by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to shut it down because it has a $700,000-a-year budget. The panel provides no public records of its meetings and offers no disclosure of how its money is spent.

The panel operates on a bipartisan basis — Dianne Feinstein of California is the Democratic cochairwoman — but the group has not met since Republicans took control of the Senate in January 2015. Records indicate Feinstein’s office received $94,000 in 2013 but nothing since.

“Since Marco assumed his role in this group, its leaders have met both formally and informally on national security issues, with most of the work occurring on a staff level,” Rubio spokesman Alex Burgos told USA TODAY. “Marco has engaged on a variety of topics central to the work of this group, including U.S.-Russia arms control, the nuclear deal with Iran and North Korea. His work on these vital national security topics has been aided by the resources provided by this group as well as the information he has obtained from the group’s discussions.”

A 2013 Senate resolution said the National Security Working Group “shall serve as a forum for bipartisan discussion of current national security issues ... (and) conduct regular meetings and maintain records of all meetings and activities.”

Tom Mentzer, a spokesman for Feinstein, said the group met three times with State Department officials in the previous Congress: once in July 2013 to discuss arms control; once in March 2014 to discuss North Korea; and once in April 2014 to discuss Iran with Secretary of State John Kerry. A meeting planned for October 2013 was scrapped because of a government shutdown. There have been no meetings since April 2014, Mentzer said.