Biden administration officials at the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation deliberated for months over how to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request related to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s use of government aircraft. , and hiding the cost to taxpayers, according to a report.
The FAA’s ostensibly independent FOIA office consulted with Buttigieg’s spokesperson and the FAA’s Flight Program Operations office while processing a request for information from Fox News about the transportation secretary’s 18 trips on government planes, according to emails obtained by the media.
In an email, David Wil Riggins, vice president of the FAA’s Flight Program Operations office, suggests changing the way flight costs are defined, in an apparent attempt to avoid sharing the information with Fox News.
“One thing I did discuss with Randa: where do we provide the ‘…cost the FAA charged for the flight…’, to use a header for that column that is something like ‘OMB Circ A-126 Cost'” , Riggins wrote in a Jan. 20 email to FAA officials.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has made at least 18 flights on government-owned planes. fake images
Riggins was responding to an email thread from December 2022, where another senior FAA official said the agency would “pause action” on the FOIA request until a “preliminary discussion” could be had.
Riggins, who heads the office responsible for maintaining the FAA’s aircraft fleet, also contacted Department of Transportation spokesman Benjamin Halle, an alumnus of Biden’s presidential campaign, and the Deputy Administrator for Communications at the FAA, Matthew Lehner, designated by the president, to arrange a phone call. discussing the FOIA request.
“Wil [Riggins], is it possible to send the spreadsheet when you have a second? I know it (sic) is not definitive, I just want to cross-check it with our record to make sure everything we have is accurate,” Halle wrote in a Jan. 26 email, sent shortly after the call. Riggins then apparently shared the FAA record of Buttigieg’s flights on government planes.
On January 30, the FAA’s FOIA manager notified other officials that response records had been compiled; However, Riggins delayed approving the FOIA request for nearly a month despite repeated insistence from the FOIA office.
The FAA shared information about Buttigieg’s flights with Fox News — omitting costs — on Feb. 27, minutes before the Washington Post reported that the Transportation Department’s inspector general had opened an investigation into the secretary’s flights.
The FAA declined to disclose information about the cost to taxpayers resulting from the flights.AP
The FAA’s FOIA office declined to say why the cost of Buttigieg’s flights was not included in the response records provided to Fox News.
A Washington Post analysis of government flights by former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price estimates Buttigieg may have cost taxpayers $5,000 per hour to fly on the planes.
Buttigieg, 41, has taken trips on FAA-run planes to Nevada, Florida, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Ohio and New Hampshire for departmental assignments, many of which are key swing states.
He also traveled to Montreal in September 2022 to attend the International Civil Aviation Organization conference.
Five of his top advisers have also taken flights without him.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn