Congressional jets

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Feb. 27, 2006, 8:29AM
LAWMAKERS TRAVEL TAB IN MILLIONS
And the cost of their flights on military aircraft is uncalculated and
unreported


By SAMANTHA LEVINE and MICHAEL HEDGES
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau

RESOURCES
COMPARISON

The different costs of flying members of Congress:
. Military: It costs the military approximately $22,000 per hour to
fly a congressional delegation aboard one of its 757 aircraft on a 15-hour
flight from Washington to London.

Cost: 15 X 22,000 =

$330,000

. Commercial: A First-Class, nonstop trip on a commercial flight from
Washington to London and back costs about $13,000 per person.

Business Class fare

approximately $3,000

Sources: U.S. Air Force; commercial airfare Web sites.

WASHINGTON - In April, the federal government spent more than $130,000 on
food and lodging for lawmakers who attended the funeral of Pope John Paul II
and later the installation of Pope Benedict XVI in Vatican City.

The funeral delegation included Reps. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, and Sheila
Jackson Lee, D-Houston. Their overnight stay cost $1,058 each.

The installation visit, which included GOP Reps. Kevin Brady of The
Woodlands and Michael McCaul of Austin, cost nearly $2,000 per person in
public money; the lawmakers spent two nights at Rome's elite five-star
Westin Excelsior hotel.

While lawmakers bedeviled by a lobbying scandal wrestle over whether to ban
private groups from paying for congressional travel, the federal government
continues to spend untold sums every year shuttling members of Congress
around the world on official trips such as the one that took the
Houston-area lawmakers to Rome.

The calculated costs for meals and lodging for these codels, or
congressional delegation journeys, topped $5 million in 2005. Similar
figures have not been compiled for the Senate.

But the largest price tag is one that will never be known: the cost of
transporting the lawmakers on planes owned by the U.S. military. The trip
disclosures that lawmakers must file omit the cost of military transport.


'Couldn't even guess'
The legislators are not told the cost, and the U.S. military spends little
time calculating it.


"The total costs are broken up among various budgets," said Powell Moore,
who served as assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs during
President Bush's first term and managed the Pentagon's dealings with
congressional travel requests. "It comes out of lots of different pots. I
couldn't even guess the total costs."

Moore, who manages federal government relations for law firm McKenna Long &
Aldridge LLP, said that while "federally supported travel is a good
investment," there were "some requests I had doubts about, but it wasn't my
role to make those judgments."

He would not elaborate.

The use of military transport, often dubbed "Pentagon Air" or "Air
Congress," has been widely accepted as the method of congressional travel
for decades. The tradition of congressional globe-trotting dates at least to
World War II, when Senate president pro tem Richard Russell, D-Ga., visited
U.S. troops stationed around the world.


Trips defended
Codels may be viewed as "the clean form of congressional travel" because
they don't "come with strings for special interests," said Craig Holman, a
lobbyist for the watchdog group Public Citizen. (ed. Clean in that it's
all from taxpayers....)


"(But) if there are big bucks being spent on publicly financed travel," he
added, "it ought to be subject to a public scrutiny process."

Such a process is unlikely to happen.

The Government Accountability Office, the watchdog agency for Congress, last
looked into the issue in 1999, finding that the system in which Congress is
supposed to reimburse the military for certain aspects of transportation was
woefully dysfunctional. The agency has no plans to restudy the issue anytime
soon.

"We don't know really what the total cost is from all of this," said Tom
Schatz, president of watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste. "And
we should. It's our money. Members have concerns about where our tax dollars
are being spent but not necessarily when it comes to their activities."

Lawmakers and government officials vigorously defend the trips as critical
to their understanding of how billions in U.S. aid are spent overseas, to
brushing up on issues that affect the United States and to building
relationships with foreign officials.

"We need to maintain contact with these people," said Rep. Solomon Ortiz,
D-Corpus Christi, who traveled in January to Poland, Bosnia and Switzerland
to talk to officials about aviation and cargo security.

"A lot of the countries we are visiting receive some type of aid from the
United States," he said. "We want to see what is being done with the money.
It is a check-and-balance system."

Some officials at U.S. embassies, which are responsible for making hotel
reservations for visiting lawmakers, arranging their appointments with local
officials and driving them around, also see an upside.

The presence of the lawmakers "enhances our relationship with the
government, think tanks, and even (local) media," said U.S. Ambassador to
Spain Eduardo Aguirre, former chairman of the Board of Regents of the
University of Houston System.

Aguirre, who took the post last summer, said lawmakers' recent trips to
Spain have focused on counterterrorism and security at ports and airports.

Members of the Texas delegation from both parties are enthusiastic
globe-trotters.

In 2005, for instance, GOP Sen. John Cornyn went to Greece, Romania, Turkey,
Hungary and the Marshall Islands to meet with finance ministers and other
top officials.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, visited U.S. troops and officials in Iraq and
Germany with the House Judiciary Committee.

Former East Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson, a Democrat, said it isn't difficult
for lawmakers to rustle up a military aircraft for the journeys, especially
if powerful committee chairmen, or those with oversight over the military or
the budget, are involved.

"It is a little art and a little science," he said. "For a senior member of
a defense committee, you can call (the planes) up any time you want one,
almost at will."

The Air Force said it costs more than $21,000 per hour to fly a member of
Congress on the military equivalent of a 737 or 757 aircraft and up to
$6,000 an hour to ferry them on smaller planes.


Higher security

Current and former lawmakers say military planes surpass commercial
airliners in many respects. Their VIP passengers' busy legislative voting
schedules require the planes to depart and return from trips on tight
schedules that would be too difficult to book on regular air carriers, they
said. Military planes also offer a higher degree of security.

Former Democratic Rep. Charlie Stenholm of West Texas said military aircraft
would be taken on training flights regardless of the lawmakers' travel.

"If you have made the decision that owning the plane is in the best
interests of the country, whether it's flying on a codel or just flying for
the purposes of training, I would argue there is very little cost or even no
cost to the codel because the money would be spent anyway," he said.