Traveling by Private Jet
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Congressman Gallego for that terrific presentation. We are also joined today by Congressman Raskin, who will be part of our dialogue as well.
Today is Thursday. That means we all need to ask: Why does Jared Kushner still have a security clearance? He already submitted two false ones. But I digress. We are actually going to talk about three other problems in the White House, one of which is Secretary Price.
To my left is a picture of the private jet that Secretary Price flew on at taxpayers' expense. But in addition to Secretary Price, we also have Secretary Mnuchin, who flew on a government jet with his wife to Kentucky in order to watch the eclipse. Now, I get that was a pretty cool thing to do, but you shouldn't be using taxpayer funds to do that.
And then we have got EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, which, according to media reports, spent $58,000 on noncommercial flights to go to different places. With $58,000, you can do a lot with that. VoteVets put out a release today saying that with $58,000 you could hire a VA spinal cord specialist at the Syracuse VA, a nurse for 1 year. Then Secretary Price spent over $400,000 of your money, and that is a lot of spinal cord specialists.
So we are talking about raiding the public funds and raiding the public trust. That is why I have introduced the SWAMP FLYERS Act, and what this act will do is stop this from happening in the future. It will prohibit senior Cabinet officials from using noncommercial flights, unless they certify, under penalty of perjury, that no commercial flights were available.
So in this case, you had Secretary Price, for example, flying from here to Nashville. I guarantee you there were lots of commercial flights. There was no reason he had to take a noncommercial flight.
In addition to what we are seeing with these three Cabinet officials, we do have sort of this culture of corruption that really needs to stop because this flows from the top. With the President, what we have now is the President staying at all these properties, private properties that are his or owned by his family, and then he comes with this massive entourage of Secret Service and other folks, and they are paying money to these properties to stay there, to eat there, and all of that money flows back to the Trump organization. So the President is enriching himself and his family at taxpayers' expense. It is no wonder that we have got these three Cabinet officials doing these insane things with taxpayers' funds.
Now we have got a Republican Congress unwilling to do oversight on this. You have got Speaker Ryan recently going on TV saying that he thinks that the present administration is doing great. Well, you can't have this kind of taxpayer waste when you have got the public trust at issue.
We also have responses from these departments that are deeply troubling. So the Treasury Department, in response to what Secretary Mnuchin was doing, in addition to his noncommercial travel to Kentucky to watch the eclipse, he also asked if the Air Force could fly him and his wife on their honeymoon. The answer is no, you can't do that.
Now the response from the Department was, well, he needed to have secure communications. Well, that was the wrong response. I can guarantee you there are other ways of getting secure communications other than to have the Air Force fly you around on your honeymoon.
With Secretary Price, again, the Department gave the wrong response.
They said, well, Secretary Price needs to go around meeting Americans, and he shouldn't be waiting 4 hours at the airport. Wrong response.
Yes, he should be waiting 4 hours at the airport because that is what other Americans do. And I can guarantee you no American flies for $25,000 to meet other Americans. Again, the wrong response from that Department.
What we need is to have these three Cabinet officials apologize. I joined with Ruben Gallego, as well as Jamie Raskin and other Members yesterday in a letter to ask for Price to resign, and all of us are also coauthors of the SWAMP FLYERS Act.
What we need now is really for the public to get engaged because what we are seeing is fraud, waste, and abuse with multiple members of the Trump Cabinet.
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