How Trump's health department fell in love with charter jets

[mahatmakanejeeves]

EXCLUSIVE

How Trump’s health department fell in love with charter jets

Documents offer new insight into the strategy of shuttling former HHS secretary Tom Price around America

By Dan Diamond and Carol D. Leonnig
Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT

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.

{snip}

The documents — released to The Post four years after Price’s abrupt ouster following Politico reports about his charter-jet spending — offer new insight into an early Trump administration controversy. The episode reshaped the federal health agency, with Price and his allies swiftly replaced by Alex Azar and a new leadership team, who came to believe that rival officials had worked to undermine Price and engineer his ouster. The claims drove a wedge between the department’s leaders and fed long-festering frustrations that exploded last year as coronavirus-related pressures bore down on the health agency, contributing to Trump officials’ fractured response to the pandemic.

In addition to reviewing the newly obtained documents, The Post spoke with officials involved in Price’s travel arrangements, his former colleagues at the department and government investigators who later probed his charter-jet plans.

{snip}

By Dan Diamond
Dan Diamond is a national health reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2021 after five years at Politico, where he won a George Polk award for investigating the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Twitter https://twitter.com/ddiamond

By Carol D. Leonnig
Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her work on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret Service. Twitter https://twitter.com/CarolLeonnig

[jmowreader]

1. This is how far we fell from Obama to Trump

In Obama’s administration honesty was a given.

Trump’s administration used the same recruiting rules Hedley Lamarr did when he was recruiting people to destroy Rock Ridge: “criminal record required.”