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Report – Taxpayer costs for Trump travel to his Florida property estimated at over $64 million

Washington Post: “…Since his first month in office, with his first weekend forays to his private retreat in Florida — Mar-a-Lago — questions have been raised about the cost of those trips. This isn’t simple to figure out, given that the total includes costs incurred by various government agencies as well as costs associated with Trump’s Secret Service protection. Although estimates of the cost existed, it would require a great deal of information from across the government to come up with an accurate total. The Government Accountability Office gathered that information. On Tuesday, it released a report looking only at Trump’s first four trips to Mar-a-Lago as president: on Feb. 3-6; Feb. 10-12; Feb. 17-20; and March 3-5, 2017.

…The immediate question, of course, is how those costs extrapolate to all of Trump’s visits. This invariably leads to some apples-oranges problems, but we can make some reasonable estimates. The GAO report notes, however, that much of the costs of the trips were incurred by the air travel to and from Palm Beach, including transporting people and material needed to support the president while there. (About $7.4 million of the total was spent by the Air Mobility Command and 89th Air Wing.) If we, therefore, assume a blanket average of $3.4 million per trip, regardless of duration, the total the government has spent on Trump’s trips to the resort tops $64 million…”

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