Your Taxpayers Dollars At Work: Ex-Im Officials Blow through Their Travel Budget by $3 Million Flying First Class

Who cares about living within one’s budget limits and being good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars? Not Ex-Im Bank officials, apparently. According to information acquired by the House Financial Services Committee and reported by the Hill last week, Ex-Im Bank officials exceeded the agency’s travel budget by $3 million over the last three years.

In fiscal 2012, Ex-Im budgeted $1.7 for travel expenses but spent $2.7 million. In fiscal 2013, Ex-Im budgeted $1.2 million but spent $2.2 million. And in this fiscal year, Ex-Im budgeted $1.3 million but expects its end-of-year spending to total $2.3 million.

That’s right: They had a budget of $4.2 million over three years and they spent $7.2 million.

Originally, everyone assumed that the reason for this excess spending had to do with all the addition traveling the agency officials had to do to go sell their services around the country. But that’s not entirely true: Officials also often splurged on first class tickets rather than travel like most of us in economy class. 

The Washington Examiner got the data and reported the following:

But documents newly obtained by the Washington Examiner show that it was not just the frequency of the travel that caused Ex-Im officials to exceed their budget, but the way they chose to travel.

No justification was provided for choosing first-class travel for three domestic flights. Documents for two domestic first-class flights cited “unavailability of coach class fares or space,” while two others cited “other reasons in the best interest of the bank.”

Among other flights, Ex-Im representatives flew first class to China ”to negotiate legal documents,” to Nigeria for “public affairs support to Chairman’s business development trip meeting with govt., business leaders and news media,” and to Los Angeles to be a “speaker at global events at UCLA with LA Chamber of Commerce and business meetings in Orange County.”

Neither the cost of the tickets nor the cost of a coach-class seat was included in the documents.

According to the Examiner, there were about 400 first-class trips during the time examined.

The whole thing is here, including examples of other agencies’ employees living large on taxpayers’ dime.