You dudes do know that the Secret Service are salaried and get paid for if the Prez is in the Whitehouse or Hawaii, right?
And that of course the previous Administration had similar expenses, right?
As are the communications staff and all the rest of the support personnel. The government owns the vehicles and the aircraft to transport them. It is, however, expensive anyway. My wife was a financial management specialist during our days with the State Department. She estimated that Bill Clinton’s Uganda visit ran about a million per day in hotel, fuel, food, local security and other costs. They refused to drink the local bottled water (which was routinely tested by local medical staff), so many pallets of Spa bottled water had to be purchased and shipped in from Belgium.
Someone needs to teach the White House how to Skype.
I’ve never heard about the video conferencing abilities of the President and Congress. I assume that kind of stuff goes on, they should highlight it more to let the plebes know they save money where possible.
So I did some looking myself. The total cost of running the Obama White House is about $1.4 billion a year, down from GWB’s $1.6 billion. However that throws everything into the bucket. Here’s one breakdown:
http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/08/how-it-costs-taxpayers-1-4-billion-a-year-to-fund-the-white-house/
According to Wiki an F-35 costs over $300 million each and rising. The Pentagon wants to build over 2000 of them.
The military has a program called Environmental Morale Leave. The military member, and in some cases, the accompanying dependents, is permitted a certain number of free flights on Military Transport Command aicraft to specific destinations. EML flights are free flights and are one of the benefits for being stationed in areas where the program is in effect.
The Navy has–or used to have around a decade ago when I retired–a prohibition on its members taking leave in the area where the member is going on Temporary Duty or even on the way there, unless the member actually pays for the difference in the travel and it can be satisfactorily shown that the TDY trip was not arranged for the purpose of alleviating leave costs for the member. The Navy was far more strict about it then than the other services were because, apparently, the Navy had gotten caught too many times pulling that stunt for some folks.
The President, on the other hand, isn’t going TDY anywhere. He’s always the President for the duration of his four (or eight, or up to ten) years in office. For him, going on vacation is a far different critter than it is for anyone else in the country.