No money for Meals on Wheels, no money for health care, endless money for the lifestyles of the rich and infamous:
The U.S. Secret Service requested $60 million in additional funding for the next year, offering the most precise estimate yet of the escalating costs for travel and protection resulting from the unusually complicated lifestyle of the Trump family, according to internal agency documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
Nearly half of the additional money, $26.8 million, would pay to protect President Trump’s family and private home in New York’s Trump Tower, the documents show, while $33 million would be spent on travel costs incurred by “the president, vice president and other visiting heads of state.”
Additional funding was already rejected once in the short time Trump has been in office:
A person familiar with internal Secret Service budget discussions said the requests for additional funding, prepared in late February, were rejected by the Office of Management and Budget, an arm of the White House. That means the agency will likely have to divert other spending to handle the additional burden. While best known for protecting the president, Secret Service agents also investigate cybercrimes, counterfeit-money operations and cases involving missing and exploited minors.
As reported last weekend, while Donald made his fifth trip to his private Mar-A-Lago club in Florida, the rest of the family jetted into Aspen for a ski weekend, with an estimated 100 Secret Service agents in tow.
Trump’s near weekly trips to play golf in Florida are costing taxpayers an estimated $3.6 million per trip. If trends continue, taxpayers can expect to fork out a whopping HALF A BILLION dollars in only 4 years:
If Melania and Barron never move to Washington and if Trump heads to Mar-a-Lago for four out of every nine weekends, our estimates put the total cost at something like $526 million over the course of Trump’s presidency. Melania Trump is apparently planning to join her husband in Washington at the end of the school year, though, and Trump calls Mar-a-Lago the “winter White House,” implying that he won’t be there in the summer. In which case the overall spending plummets further.
Here is candidate Donald Trump telling a cheering crowd that "There is not time for vacation. We’re not going to be big on vacation.” Watch the extraordinary hypocrisy on display as he says there is no reason to leave the White House with so much work to do:
Like everything with this administration, the joke is on the taxpayers.