According to Secretary tom price, until a review is completed by the Department of Health and Human Service's Inspector General, he will no longer travel using private planes. Tom Price announced this on Fox News on Saturday, days after Politico had reported that his private charter flights had spent more than $400,000 of taxpayer money, since May.

Spending taxpayer money on 'urgent, official' business

During his interview with Leland Vittert, Tom Price said that his use of private charter flights for travel was for official business. However, at least one White House official said that they weren't quite sure what the Secretary was doing.

Price claimed that he used the private planes for official business.

But these are also the same reasons given by other cabinet officials such as President Trump's Secretary of the Treasury Department, Steve Mnuchin, who is also under review for using taxpayer funds to travel on a government plane. Various reports have shown that in many cases when cabinet officials used private or government jets, they had the opportunity to save taxpayer money using commercial flights, especially for travel that didn't require the kind of urgency those officials claimed to have.

For instance, with Mnuchin, his use of a C-37 jet that cost $25,000 per hour was used during the solar eclipse on August 21, which Mnuchin was seen leaving the plane with his wife on the same day in an image she posted on her Instagram account.

For Price, there were times when he could have used commercial flights to travel to his destinations, without delays.

Price's contradictions

In his Fox News interview, Price said that they had taken 11 trips over an "eight-month period of time." But an article by Politico points out in its headline: "Price traveled by private plane at least 24 times" that even that statement was incorrect. He also said that he had traveled by car in trips that he said amount to "an average of four and five hours at a time."

The same article referred to Price taking a charter flight to Oklahoma on Sept. 19, where he met with Native American tribes and "toured healthcare facilities by car." It was pointed out that the department's political staff were pushing for him to be flown to those small communities in the area as opposed to being driven.

It was also reported that his staff cut a news conference short when reporters in Oklahoma started asking him questions about using taxpayer money for the flights. Here is a clip of Price's Fox News interview.
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