Biden administration officials at the Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Department have been deliberating for months on how to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests related to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s use of government aircraft and obscuring the cost to taxpayers, according to reports.
The FAA’s ostensibly independent FOIA office consulted with Buttigieg’s spokesman and the FAA’s Office of Aviation Program Operations as it processed a request for information from Fox News about the transportation secretary’s 18 trips on government jets, according to emails obtained by the outlet.
In an email, David Wil Riggins, vice president of the FAA’s Office of Aviation Program Operations, proposed changing the way costs for flights are defined, in an apparent attempt to avoid sharing information with Fox News.
“One thing I discussed with Randa: where we provide ‘…FAA charged costs for flights…’, to use a header for that column like ‘OMB Circ A-126 Cost,’” Riggins wrote in a Jan. 20 email to FAA officials.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has taken at least 18 flights on government-owned aircraft. Getty Images
Riggins has responded to an email thread from December 2022, in which another senior FAA official said the agency would “act” on FOIA requests until “preliminary discussions” can take place.
Riggins, who heads the office responsible for maintaining the FAA’s aircraft fleet, also contacted Transportation Department spokesman Benjamin Halle, an alumnus of the Biden presidential campaign, and FAA Assistant Communications Administrator Matthew Lehner, a presidential appointee, for a phone call discussing the FOIA request.
“Will [Riggins], is it possible to send the spreadsheet when you get time? I know it’s (sic) not final, I just want to check it against our records to make sure what we have is all accurate,” Halle wrote in a Jan. 26 email, sent shortly after the call. Riggins later apparently shared Buttigieg’s FAA flight logs on the government jet.
On January 30, the FAA’s FOIA manager told other officials that responsive records had been compiled, however, Riggins delayed signing the FOIA request for nearly a month despite repeated urging by the FOIA office.
The FAA shared information about Buttigieg’s flight with Fox News — excluding 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 flight.
The FAA declined to release information on the cost to taxpayers resulting from the flight.AP
The FAA’s FOIA office declined to say why Buttigieg’s flight costs were not included in responsive records provided to Fox News.
An analysis of government aviation commissioned by former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price conducted by the Washington Post estimated that Buttigieg could cost taxpayers $5,000 an hour to fly the jet.
Buttigieg, 41, has traveled on FAA-managed planes to Nevada, Florida, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Ohio and New Hampshire on department duties, many of which are swing states.
He also traveled to Montreal in September 2022 to attend the International Civil Aviation Organization conference.
Five of his senior advisers have also taken the flight without him.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
