How TFG's health department fell in love with charter jets
In April 2017, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services grappled with an urgent request: how to get Tom Price from D.C. to a conference at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Laguna Niguel, Calif., after bad weather delayed the secretary’s planned flight aboard Delta Air Lines.
“Secretary needs to go to LA today, and leave by 3 p.m.,” one travel specialist wrote in an April 6, 2017, email obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request. The travel aide was seeking a colleague with access to a government purchasing card. “Do you have someone who can PCard a charter aircraft on short notice?”
Officials quickly secured a $29,000 charter flight — which also had to be scuttled, as tornadoes plagued the D.C. region. But the day’s events left a scar on Price’s top aides, who vowed that the Trump Cabinet official would never again wait on a commercial airline’s schedule, and foreshadowed a five-month travel sprint in which the health department spent $456,000 in taxpayer money on Price’s charter flights across the United States.
One of the final trips came in September 2017, when health officials chartered a jet for Price, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and their aides to fly round trip between Washington and Philadelphia — at a cost of $14,955 to taxpayers, according to government records.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-trumps-health-department-fell-in-love-with-charter-jets/ar-AAPcadE
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