In the hallowed journalistic pantheon of “Wasteful Taxpayer-funded Junkets by Federal Officials Stories,” the Wall Street Journal has a classic today about a trip to Edinburgh for a North American Treaty Organization (NATO) Parliamentary Assembly attended by 12 legislators and their families:
Besides rooms for sleeping, the 12 members of the House of Representatives rented their hotel’s fireplace-equipped presidential suite and two adjacent rooms. The hotel cleared out the beds and in their place set up a bar, a snack room and office space. The three extra rooms — stocked with liquor, Coors beer, chips and salsa, sandwiches, Mrs. Fields cookies and York Peppermint Patties — cost a total of about $1,500 a night. They were rented for five nights.
According to the Journal, since a 2005 crackdown on privately-funded travel, taxpayer-funded travel has increased drastically.
The cost they reported for such travel abroad was $13 million in 2008, a 70% jump from 2005, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records. Lawmakers don’t have to report the cost of domestic travel when the government pays. The $13 million didn’t include the expense of flying on Air Force planes, which lawmakers don’t have to disclose.
The trip included chauffeurs, military escorts who did things like making booze runs to nearby liquor stores and dinner at one of the finest restaurants in Scotland. It’s one of those stories where, despite nothing illegal or untoward going on, the reader is provided a nice glimpse of business as usual. Awesome stuff; read the whole piece, but not if you suffer from high blood pressure.