The conservative political website Hot Air has decided it’s time to compare the travel expenses of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt with those of his predecessors.
The website’s reporters did some comparison of the expenses that Pruitt, the former Oklahoma Attorney General has run up in his first year in office. While national news organizations have carried bold headlines about Pruitt’s first-class travels and a $30,000 tab on a trip to Italy, Hot Air found two previous EPA administrators racked up similar bills.
Under the headline, “Anybody Recall The Media Looking at Gina McCarthy’s Travel Expenses?”, Hot Air reported:
In 2016, Team McCarthy made three trips spending the following amounts:
$68,382 to travel to Ghana
$45,139 to travel to Peru
$74,737 to travel to Tokyo
They were a bit more busy in 2015 it seems. McCarthy and the security team racked up the following bills:
$41,320 to travel to Paris
$90,367 to travel to Dubai
$67,702 to travel to Tokyo
$56,192 to travel to Italy
While some national news groups were critical of Pruitt for visiting the Vatican during his G7 summit attendance, McCarthy did the same thing when she traveled to Italy.
But Hot Air reported that’s not all it found about McCarthy’s travels.
Moving on, Gina McCarthy and her security detail hit the road a bit in 2014 as well.
$62,246 to travel to Vancouver (Seriously? It costs that much to go to Canada?)
$68,267 to travel to Vietnam
McCarthy and company only took one trip in 2013, spending $55,384 to travel to China.
Delving back into travel records of Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator who preceded McCarthy, Hot Air made similar discoveries.
Before McCarthy there was Lisa Jackson who also answered the beckoning call of the road on occasion. Let’s see how she and her security detail did.
2012: $64,963 to travel to Israel.
2011: $59,950 to travel to Rio De Janeiro.
2011: $51,435 to travel to Montreal.
2011: $155,763 to travel to China. (No, that wasn’t a typo. That was more than $155K for a single trip.)
As for the reaction at Pruitt’s EPA? Here’s what spokesman Jahan Wilcox told Hot Air.
“The double-standard couldn’t be more clear: under Barack Obama’s EPA the media chose not to report on expenditures to protect the EPA Administrator for international travel or the costs of their trips, but under the Trump Administration the costs to protect our government officials is somehow scandalous.”
