GOP Blasts Obama for Travel Costs

By PETER NICHOLAS

Republicans are escalating their attack on President Barack Obama for repeated trips to states that will be important in the fall election and asking for an investigation of taxpayer money spent on what they contend are really campaign appearances.

The complaints shine a spotlight on what experts say both parties have allowed to remain a hazy legal issue: Who gets to decide if a presidential trip is really a political event. The answer seems to be that due to silence in the law, the White House gets to decide.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

President Obama arrives at Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado Tuesday before speaking at the University of Colorado in Boulder on student loans.

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) criticized Mr. Obama Thursday for visits this week to college campuses in the battleground states of North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa and for using a "fake fight" with Congress over a planned increase in federally subsidized student loan rates as a pretext for his travel.

Mr. Boehner said the Obama re-election campaign should repay the government for using Air Force One and other public resources for the trips. "This is the biggest job in the world, and I've never seen a president make it smaller," the speaker said.

The Republican National Committee sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office dated Wednesday asking for an investigation into the president's travels and singling out the campus visits. Reince Priebus, chairman of the RNC, wrote that the president was asking taxpayers to underwrite political rallies.

An RNC spokeswoman said the committee may ask a lawmaker to formally request the inquiry, given that the GAO said it begins such investigations only at the request of members of Congress.

The White House said the trips were official business, in which costs are covered by the taxpayers, not campaign trips to be funded by the Obama re-election campaign. White House spokesman Eric Schultz said the president's travel this week was part of his "official responsibility to get outside of Washington" and discuss his priorities. He said the president would fulfill similar duties Friday when he meets troops and veterans in Georgia. "When there is political travel, we follow all rules and regulations that all other administrations have followed," Mr. Schultz said.

While the focus of the three campus visits was student loans, Mr. Obama used his appearances to broadly attack Republicans. "They voted to keep giving billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to big oil companies who are raking in record profits. They voted to let millionaires and billionaires keep paying lower tax rates than middle-class workers," he told students at the University of Iowa on Wednesday. Students responded at Chapel Hill, N.C., with chants of "Four more years!"

Brendan Doherty, an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who has studied presidential travel, said both Mr. Obama and Republican George W. Bush traveled "disproportionately" to battleground states throughout their terms in office in comparison to earlier presidents. "The complaint by the RNC is one that the [Democratic National Committee] could have launched against George W. Bush eight years ago," he said.

Federal election law states that campaign events must be paid for out of campaign funds. But the law gives little guidance on what other events are considered campaign-related, said Paul Ryan, senior counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. The Federal Election Commission, he said, "has never defined a campaign event, and consequently there are no rules or guidance of the bounds of what constitutes a campaign event."

The result is that the White House has discretion in classifying a presidential trip as official business or a political event. "If you're raising money for the campaign, it is a campaign event,'' Mr. Ryan said. "But when you're not raising money for the campaign, it's a gray area.''

Based on a 2010 rule change by the FEC, the White House reimburses taxpayers when paying for campaign travel according to a formula that estimates what the trip would cost aboard a chartered 737 jet. Still, taxpayers pick up part of the expense, including the cost of Secret Service and military aides on the trip.

In 2007, the Congressional Research Service said in a report that it is up to the White House to determine whether a trip is for official or political purposes, or a combination of the two, and that official travel may involve "securing public support" for White House policies.

The GAO has examined presidential travel in the past. In 1999, at the request of three Republican senators, it examined the trips taken by former President Bill Clinton to Africa, China and Chile the year before. Known as the General Accounting Office at the time, it estimated the trips cost taxpayers $72.1 million. One of its findings was that the executive branch lacked "a single system to account for the cost of presidential travel overseas.''

?Carol E. Lee contributed to this article.

Write to Peter Nicholas at peter.nicholas@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 27, 2012, on page A5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: GOP Blasts Obama for Travel Costs.

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