Trump says he’ll look into Price’s private-jet use

WASHINGTON — Tom Price's fondness for taxpayer-funded private jet trips drew the ire on Wednesday of President Donald Trump, who said he was disappointed in his secretary of health and human services, and would personally examine any financial malfeasance.

Trump, who vowed during the 2016 presidential campaign that he would wring the capital of excess financial waste, publicly voiced his disapproval of Price for taking dozens of privately chartered flights that crisscrossed the nation to resort areas and conferences, racking up a tab of $400,000. Before departing on a trip to Indiana to pitch his tax rewrite plan, the president, who has not released his tax returns or completely divested himself from his real estate empire, sought to put out the latest ethical fire set by a member of his Cabinet.

"I was looking into it, and I will look into it. And I will tell you personally, I'm not happy about it," Trump said of Price. "I am not happy about it. I'm going to look at it. I am not happy about it, and I let him know it."

According to a senior administration official familiar with Trump's thinking, the president's willingness to ferret out financial wrongdoing is not good news for Price, a physician and a former Georgia congressman who has been a vocal proponent of cost-cutting within his own agency. Trump, who is known to dislike appearances of financial waste, is said to be increasingly frustrated with a series of reports published by Politico about Price's spending habits.

Politico has revealed that Price has made at least 26 such flights, including trips to Nashville, where his son lives and where Price owns a condominium, and to St. Simons Island, a Georgia resort area where Price owns property and recently spoke at a medical conference. Price also chartered a flight that included travel to Philadelphia from Dulles International Airport in Virginia, a distance of about 130 miles.

On Wednesday, Caitlin Oakley, a spokeswoman for Price, said in an email that Price supported an internal review of his travel. She said that Price takes criticism over his travel "very seriously and has taken it to heart."

"The secretary has initiated an internal departmental review of the procedures and processes that we go through for official travel," Oakley wrote.

In recent days, Price has defended himself by saying he has a busy travel schedule, and on Saturday, Price told Fox News that he would stop traveling on private jets until a review of his activities was completed.

"We've taken many, many trips in cars — sometimes four and five hours at a time," he told the network.

According to the senior administration official, Trump is less perturbed by the actions of two other Cabinet members who have fallen under recent scrutiny for their spending: Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Pruitt recently took the unusual step of installing a $25,000 soundproof booth in his office to conduct secure communications, and Mnuchin inquired about using a military plane for his honeymoon in Europe last month. He also took a government plane on a trip that included a viewing of the solar eclipse on Aug. 21 in Kentucky. That trip fell under scrutiny when Mnuchin's wife, Louise Linton, took a stranger to task on Instagram for criticizing the couple's luxurious lifestyle.

The president has publicly defended Mnuchin, whose trips came under an official review after the trip to Kentucky. Responding to an ABC News report that Mnuchin had taken a $25,000 trip to Washington from New York, accompanied by Elaine Chao, the secretary of transportation, the president told reporters to check their facts.

"Why don't you check your records before you make a statement," Trump said to reporters on Sunday. "As I understood it — I don't know much about it — I haven't heard about it, but I understand he never took that flight."

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into the travel of Trump's senior administration members. The investigation, opened by Reps. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the committee's chairman, and Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the panel's ranking Democrat, will examine the use of private and government travel by senior officials, and will request passenger names, destinations and the source of payment for each trip, among other details. The committee is requesting all related documents by Oct. 10.

Ethics experts are critical of the spending activities of Trump's Cabinet members, many of whom were wealthy before they entered public service. Richard W. Painter, an ethics counsel in the George W. Bush White House and a frequent critic of Trump, said that his weekly jaunts to Trump-owned resorts have created a culture of entitlement in the administration.

"Every time they've gone to Mar-a-Lago, it's a couple of million just to haul Air Force One down there," Painter said, referring to Trump's private club in Florida. "Those other guys say, 'Gee, I'm important too, I ought to get a private jet. I shouldn't wait to sit around and have Delta Air Lines kick me around.'"

Matthew Dallek, an associate professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management who studies political history, said that accusations of overspending have plagued nearly every modern presidency: John H. Sununu, the chief of staff for President George H.W. Bush, came under fire in 1991 for taking a government limousine to New York from Washington to attend a stamp auction. (He later resigned.) In 1994, David Watkins, the White House director of administration for President Bill Clinton, resigned after taking a $13,129 trip aboard a Marine presidential helicopter to play golf in Maryland.

"The consequences have been swifter" in the past, Dallek said. "People have lost their jobs for lesser offenses."

At least two Cabinet members have publicly said that they foot the bill for their travel: Betsy DeVos, the billionaire education secretary, uses her own private jet in her travels around the country "at zero cost to U.S. taxpayers," according to her spokeswoman, Elizabeth Hill.

Linda McMahon, the former chief executive officer of World Wrestling Entertainment and the current administrator of Small Business Administration — and another billionaire in Trump's Cabinet — covers the cost on private planes "out of her own pocket," according to her spokeswoman, Carol Wilkerson.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.