President Obama, who likes to joke that his lease on Air Force One is running out, plans to put a lot more mileage on the costly presidential aircraft in 2016.
With foreign travel a mainstay of lame-duck presidents, the White House has scheduled at least four more trips abroad for Mr. Obama in his final year in office: Japan in June, Poland in July, China in September and Peru in November. All the trips will coincide with stops at international meetings such as the annual NATO and Group of Seven summits.
And the list keeps growing: The White House announced just on Wednesday that Mr. Obama will swing by Germany in late April to confer with Chancellor Angela Merkel and become the first sitting U.S. president to participate in the Hannover Messe, the world’s largest trade show for industrial technology.
The five junkets would bring Mr. Obama’s total number of overseas trips during his presidency to 49, breaking a tie with predecessor George W. Bush but falling short of Bill Clinton’s record 54 trips abroad. Mr. Obama has spent a total of 175 days over seven years traveling outside the U.S., compared with 231 days for Mr. Clinton and 218 for Mr. Bush during their two full terms.
There’s also the strong possibility of Mr. Obama making a high-profile trip to Cuba sometime in 2016, to highlight his move restoring diplomatic relations with the communist-ruled island. The only other sitting president to travel to Cuba was Calvin Coolidge way back in 1928.
Presidential aides defend overseas travel as a necessary and valuable part of diplomacy, such as Mr. Obama’s quick two-day trip to Paris last month to help drive negotiations toward a climate change deal with other world leaders. But the Obama White House, like previous administrations, has been less than transparent about the cost to taxpayers of presidential travel.
“At least we ought to have an honest discussion about the costs,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a nonprofit watchdog group. “The military costs are unfathomable. The Air Force One costs that we get are only for one plane’s hourly rate; it doesn’t talk about the costs of all the other military assets that are put in place once they get there.”
Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the Secret Service last month for failing to respond to 19 of the group’s Freedom of Information Act requests dating back to July 2014 for security-related travel expenses incurred by Mr. Obama and other government VIPs.
“Many Americans would be displeased to know that there’s an entire wing of the Air Force that is comprised of luxury jets to move President Obama and other VIPs around the country and around the world,” Mr. Fitton said. “It’s a massive operation that costs untold millions, and we can’t afford it. Even the so-called ’business trips’ are unnecessary.”
The Secret Service didn’t respond to a request for comment about its reasons for not complying with the FOIA requests.
Judicial Watch has pegged the known foreign and domestic travel costs of the Obama and Biden families since 2009 at more than $70 million. But that’s based in large part on the hourly rate to operate Air Force One and other government jets, while this administration and previous ones routinely fail to disclose a wide range of related travel costs, from Secret Service preparations to ground transportation to movement of military assets.
On Monday the Department of Homeland Security disclosed in response to another Judicial Watch request that the Secret Service ran up expenses of $316,698 for security during the Obamas’ 17-day Christmas vacation in Hawaii in 2013. The watchdog group said these newly disclosed expenses bring the total cost for that Hawaii Christmas vacation trip to $8,098,060.
The heavily redacted documents showed $91,751 in car rental expenses paid to Alamo and $224,970 for Secret Service accommodations.
With their domestic agenda typically on deep-freeze as Congress and the nation prepare for the next election, the phenomenon of presidents hitting the road in their final year is nothing new. A January 1988 Associated Press story chronicled President Reagan’s final-year “wanderlust” — including summits in Canada, the Soviet Union and Europe, as well as his “annual get-together with the president of Mexico” — and said Reagan was only following the precedent set by Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Saying the idea of “marking time” did not appeal to him, Eisenhower in his memoirs wrote that he decided he would rather put his popularity to use around the globe, scheduling lengthy, multination “good will” tours first of South America and then of East Asia.
President Obama and his family are in the midst of another two-week holiday vacation at a rented home in the Kailua section of Oahu, where Mr. Obama is enjoying rounds of golf, workouts at a Marine Corps base gym, hiking on scenic nature trails and leisurely three-hour dinners at high-end restaurants. Aides are quick to note that the president never leaves his work behind. For example, on Monday he received a national security briefing on progress by Iraqi Security Forces fighting the Islamic State to retake the city of Ramadi.
Air Force One is one of the biggest expenses involved with presidential travel, whether in the U.S. or abroad. The plane costs taxpayers $206,337 per hour of flight time, meaning the president’s brief trip to Paris a month ago cost nearly $3 million in flight time alone.
In the summer of 2013, Mr. Obama took his family on a weeklong trip to sub-Saharan Africa that was estimated to cost taxpayers between $60 million and $100 million. The plans reportedly included deployment of an aircraft carrier and the shipping of 14 armored presidential limousines to the continent.
On that trip, the Secret Service’s hotel costs alone totaled $953,788, according to the National Taxpayers Union. The Obamas pay for their rental housing during their annual Christmas vacations in Hawaii and summer vacations on Martha’s Vineyard.
The government’s current pair of Air Force One jumbo jets, which are customized Boeing 747-200B models, were ordered by President Reagan and have been in operation since 1990. The Department of Defense has ordered a new plane, which will be larger, faster and more technologically advanced; it should be ready for use by another president in about eight years, at a cost of at least $3 billion.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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