Once again this week, there were questions for a federal agency about travel and conference spending, as a Senate GOP budget hawk pressed the Justice Department for answers on why it spent more than $58 million on conferences in Fiscal Year 2012.
And as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) noted in a letter to the Justice Department this week, that type of spending seems to have continued into 2013.
"Last week, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) participated in its annual International Drug Enforcement Conference in Moscow, Russia," Coburn wrote in his letter, as he demanded to know how much the trip cost U.S. taxpayers, saying the DEA evidently leased the Crowne Plaza Hotel and World Trade Center in Moscow - with up to 340 hotel rooms and meeting spaces.
"What is the total cost of the conferences to the United States Government?" Coburn asked as part of a series of questions to DOJ officials.
"Please include all airfare, lodging, leasing, rental, planning, per diem and other costs," he added.
Coburn's letter included a helpful reference to a document on the Department of Justice web site, which lists every DOJ conference from 2012 that cost more than $100,000.
The list of those conferences takes up 28 pages.
The conferences included one in the Northern Mariana Islands where the Justice Department spent more than $105,000 that focused on violence against women - but no federal employees attended (there were 47 people there for the gathering.)
Another $198,358 went to send four DOJ employees to a drug enforcement gathering in Dakar, Senegal.
Thirty DOJ employees spent almost $500,000 for a five day international drug conference in Indonesia.
That was the 2012 version of the event in Moscow which Coburn was requesting more information on the tab for U.S. taxpayers.
One of the events is labeled "Indonesia Court Security," but it takes place in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as two DOJ employees took "senior Indonesian police officials" and others to courts and other locations in Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico for $101,691.
Here is just a small sample of the 28 pages of conferences from FY 2012 that cost taxpayers over $100,000 at the Justice Department. You can see the entire document at http://www.justice.gov/jmd/publications/fy2012-conferences-over-100k.pdf
Coburn's letter is at http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=4628445e-3a91-4238-b1d0-904a378ae28d
Once again this week, there were questions for a federal agency about travel and conference spending, as a Senate GOP budget hawk pressed the Justice Department for answers on why it spent more than $58 million on conferences in Fiscal Year 2012. And as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) noted in ...
