Give Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Brock Long credit for this much: Unlike other Trump administration officials who’ve abused their offices to charter flights, take military planes, and fly first class, Long’s questionable use of government vehicles involves the lowly automobile.
The FEMA head with the soft porn name faces a Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s investigation into his use of government cars—and staffers—to get him home to North Carolina every weekend, an investigation started after one of the cars was involved in an accident. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has also taken issue with the amount of time Long spends away from Washington, D.C., and home in North Carolina, and may have gone as far as asking him to consider resigning.
Long started using a staff driver to get him home to North Carolina at the beginning of his tenure at FEMA last year. On the weekends Long spent in North Carolina, aides were put up in a hotel at taxpayer expense, according to one of the current officials.
As usual, Trump administration practices have been a major departure from Obama administration practices:
Former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, who served under President Barack Obama, said he could remember using government cars for commuting purposes only in seven instances during the eight years he held the job. In those emergency or extreme cases, Fugate said, it was deemed appropriate for a FEMA aide to brief him face-to-face as a driver took him from his home in Gainesville, Florida, to the Jacksonville airport for outbound flights to Washington, where his presence was required.
It’s an administration of grifters, top to bottom.