WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has already spent $10.7 million of taxpayer cash to play golf since retaking the White Home final month, an expense that seems to have escaped the eye of his “Division of Authorities Effectivity” waste, fraud and abuse hunters.
The golf-related bills — that are prone to recur most weekends whereas Trump is in workplace — have in some way flown under the radar of Elon Musk and his “high-IQ” staff, as Trump calls them, of programmers who’re ransacking their means by means of the federal funds and labeling objects they don’t like or seem to not perceive as “fraud.”
Whilst they level out five- and six-figure contracts and grants as wasteful, they’ve ignored every of Trump’s seven-figure golf journeys thus far. A search of posts by DOGE on Musk’s social media web site as soon as generally known as Twitter discovered zero mentions of the phrase “golf.”
A senior White Home official directed questions on DOGE — which Trump created by government order on his first day in workplace — to the White Home press workplace. Neither that workplace, nonetheless, nor a number of officers within the Trump White Home responded to HuffPost’s queries in regards to the 4 golf journeys.
There was a golf journey every of the 4 weekends since Trump got here again to the presidency on Jan. 20, and he has now performed golf at his personal properties on 9 of his first 30 days in workplace.
“It’s clear that when the Trump administration considers the definition of corruption and wasteful spending, it doesn’t depend spending that results in the president’s pockets,” mentioned Jordan Libowitz of the watchdog group Residents for Duty and Ethics in Washington. “By visiting his for-profit companies roughly a 3rd of his days in workplace, Trump is directing authorities spending to observe him there, and profiting off the journey.”
HuffPost’s $10.7 million tally is predicated on a 2019 report by the Authorities Accountability Workplace breaking down the prices of Trump’s first journeys to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Seaside, Florida, nation membership, throughout his first time period. The GAO calculated a complete value of $3,383,250 for every journey. About one-third of that was the flight value of Air Power One for the spherical journey, with extra bills for flying down automobiles, together with two presidential limousines, for Trump’s motorcade and reimbursing the Coast Guard for stationing a gunship within the Atlantic Ocean simply off the coast and closely armed boats within the Intracoastal Waterway.
These prices are primarily based on 2017 {dollars} and are probably considerably larger immediately.
HuffPost was then in a position to extrapolate these figures to derive totals for his different golf locations, together with programs he owns in Doral, Florida; Palos Verdes, California; Bedminster, New Jersey; and his programs in Eire and Scotland.
“By visiting his for-profit companies roughly a 3rd of his days in workplace, Trump is directing authorities spending to observe him there, and profiting off the journey.”
– Jordan Libowitz, Residents for Duty and Ethics in Washington
In Trump’s first time period, his golf bills totaled $152 million over 4 years, for a complete of 293 golf days at his personal resorts.
So far in his second time period, Trump has performed golf at his personal resorts every of the 4 weekends he has been in workplace. Three of the 4 have been at his course in West Palm Seaside throughout his Mar-a-Lago visits, though the golf-related complete for one of many journeys is diminished by about $546,000 as a result of the journey included a leg to New Orleans to take part within the Tremendous Bowl. The entire for the primary journey, to Doral, can be lower than a pure golf trip would have value as a result of it included a phase out to Los Angeles and Las Vegas on official White Home enterprise. HuffPost isn’t counting these flight prices towards his golf complete.
“It could be one factor if he went to Camp David each few days to hit golf balls. It’s exhausting to see this as something aside from utilizing the presidency to prop up his companies,” Libowitz mentioned.
Trump allies spent former President Joe Biden’s time period criticizing him for spending most of his weekends at his Delaware houses in Wilmington and Rehoboth Seaside and complaining in regards to the taxpayer bills.
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These journey prices, nonetheless, had been a fraction of those who Trump was and is incurring. More often than not, Biden traveled forwards and backwards through Marine 1, with the helicopter journey costing about $150,000. When he used the smaller Air Power One, a modified Boeing 757, the journey bills totaled about $500,000.
