A few years back a White House insider wrote a book. In it he said that every President, no matter how wealthy or from whatever party complains of the cost when they get the bill after their first month in office.
I don’t begrudge the President the perks of the office. After all, he heads the richest, most powerful country in the world. And, he isn’t earning Wall Street money. Cutting back on the White House budget would be a drop in the bucket.
I remember when Nixon was in office around the time of the Arab oil embargo he wanted to go to California for the holiday. He flew on a commercial plane. I had a friend who was a “hippy”, hated the war and Nixon. Still he said, “How stupid is that. After all, he is the President.” The rest of the story is that they flew AF1 out to California for the return trip.
The point is, all those aides, military council, secret service etc. travel with him. They likely ship a set of special armoured cars, then there’s the electronics and weaponry, etc. He didn’t ask for them to come with him, they come with him as part of the job; he can’t get away from it. So the government sends them. Why should he bear the cost of the job requirements? That big jet isn’t doing the trip simply because the president sai “Hmmm, maybe I’d like to take a jumbo to Hawaii”.
When a soldier goes home on leave, do they pay for the ticket or does a government plane fly them out? Seems to me that given the number of soldiers and their remote locations that the bill to jockey them around would be higher than the presidents.
We maintain a vacation home of the President, Camp David, and it is quite nice from what I here. In any case, I think the big travel expense is probably the Secret Service. When the President wants to shoot a round of golf we all have to pay the cost of closing the course and having the SS check behind all the bushes. Maybe the courses don’t charge him, I don’t know, but we still have to pay the SS personal.
Isn’t the job stressful enough already? These guys age fast in office, and with modern communications, it’s not like he’s ever truly away from work, anyway.
On this board somewhere I told the story of scuba diving with someone under secret service protection. There were secret service agents underwater with her. Protecting her from what exactly? WTF?
I did not check the billing but I assume the US government paid for the dive outing for the agents and the person being protected paid her own way.
Yeah, probably and doesn’t that seem kind of silly? When the president goes somewhere we pay fulltime salaries, travel costs, lodging and food to how many guys to protect him? What’s the point of quibbling about how much the Mr. President’s sandwich cost the taxpayers?
I’d like to know how they scuba dive in those dark suits and sunglasses. They were protecting her from you BTW.
Count me as confused-we have 35 million people out of work…and yet, Obama goes out of his way to spend more money. Would it not be appropriate do demonstrate a tiny bit of restraint? $20 million shopping trips are a bit too much. For a bankrupt country with an enormous national debt, it might be nice for the POTUS to set an example.
They dive with six agents spread out in an arc slightly above and behind the protected individual. Poor positioning to be able to react to an emergency, IMHO. It was like watching aircraft in formation or something. Very weird.
Depends. If you’re in a combat zone, you fly out on military charter aircraft. If you’re just flying home from your base in Japan for vacation, it’s on your nickel. Troop movements, on the other hand, are either on military aircraft, or, more likely, military charter with a commercial airline.
Look, I don’t give a crap. People bitched about GWB taking vacation when stuff was happening too. And Clinton. And GHWB. Being head of state is far more demanding than an 8-to-5 job like mine, and you don’t just suddenly lose the need for rest just because a bunch of people voted for you.
[Moderating] Ralph and others, please remember that this is GQ and no political potshots are allowed here. We do have other forums where you can attack (or debate) such things, but GQ is about factual answers to the OP’s question.
Sometimes the soldier’s vacation airfare is paid for I was able to get plane tickets paid for to visit my folks for two weeks because it was on the way to a place the military needed me to be for work. Similarly, in the Air Force at least, if you have two overseas assignments back-to-back, they buy you a plane ticket home to go on leave (the assumption being that they would have bought you plane tickets anyways, so they might as well encourage you to take some time off to destress).
It’s not at all unusual for jobs that require extended relocation and severe disruptions in family life to have leave allowances. Even as a lowly Peace Corps volunteers, we received a special allowance for our leave days and if we committed to more than two years, we were required to take 30 days of leave to our home of record or someplace with equivalent travel expenses. Most of the NGO foreign expat type jobs I know of offer at least a yearly trip home, as well as mandated breaks at a regional R&R location. Thats also not unusual for jobs that require the type of travel where you spend long stretches in extended stay hotels and other temporary situations.
Employers have an investment in making sure their employee do not burn out. You do need to have some level of balance in your life to be able to work productively and make smart decisions. Would you really trust the ongoing mental health of a president who was basically a prisoner in the White House?
Perhaps the entourage is smaller when the President travels wthin the US for a vacation, but for an official overseas trip, it’s really big. First of all, the Secret Service makes multiple advance visits to check the security of the sites he’ll be going to. Hundreds of Secret Service agents go with the President, along with that really heavily armored limousine, and even Marine One (the presidential helicopter) travels with him. It’s unbelievably complex and expensive. (If you want a cite, see this article from The Guardian describing what’s involved in a presidential trip to London.)
I’m lazy so I’ll ask a question of the experts who love to research this stuff. What is the cost of one F-35 fighter jet compared to the budget of Presidential travel and security?
Can’t answer that one offhand, but I can tell you that the cost to repaint an F-22 is around a cool million. This from the AF people for whom we were building an F-22 repainting facility that cost a coincidental $22 million.