Are you sick of hearing about Trump appointees spending curiously large amounts of taxpayer money on things like private jet flights, barely disguised vacations, or new office furniture? Yeah, too bad—because it turns out Trump's U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, went on quite the office shopping spree.
US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer spent more than $917,000 to furnish the two trade offices near the White House, according to contracts reviewed by The Post.
That’s a significant increase compared to the last two trade reps.
It's not just a significant increase, it's an enormous increase.
Ron Kirk, President Barack Obama’s first trade ambassador, spent $237,000 on office furniture during the first 15 months of his term.
His successor, Ambassador Michael Froman, spent $151,000 during a comparable time span, records show.
All right, but at least the expenditures weren't for his own private office, right? They were for things like 60 sit-stand desks, top-notch Herman Miller office chairs, and nearly half a million bucks to a furniture company that "specializes in rich wood-finished desks and high-grade furniture fit for bosses." That might or might not be overlavish spending; it's suspicious, but not overtly crooked.
What might tip the scales on that is if Lighthizer's office tried to deflect blame with a thoroughly debunkable lie about it being Barack Obama's fault. Which they did, claiming that it was a "longtime, planned project" of the Obama administration—and the Obama team isn't just denying that such a thing existed, they're openly mocking Lighthizer's claim that the Trump administration's hands were tied on this one.
“We told 11 other countries that we were going to do a trade deal with them, and the Trump administration found the power to unwind that,” the Obama trade official told The Post. “So furniture purchases cannot be as binding as a trade agreement that the president of the United States signed.”
That was last week; this week, reporters discovered that Lighthizer did do a bit of work on his own office as well, spending almost $4,000 on a new mahogany desk, returning that new desk, and buying yet another mahogany desk, this one "a real desk made in England."
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not respond to other questions regarding its decision to replace the desks or whether they exceeded the $5,000 spending limit.
An additional $858 spent to appoint the office with the U.S. Office of the Trade Representative seal and another $830 for the unrelated installation of two paintings in his office would appear to put Lighthizer over the limit, but it is not clear if Congress was notified.
Now, I am all for government workers getting sit-stand desks if they want them, and you can make a case, if you felt so inclined, that the U.S. Trade Representative needs a top-notch mahogany desk because if he didn't have one all the other countries would laugh at him and not take him seriously in negotiations and call him Bobby Cheapdesk behind his back. Sure, whatever. But what appears to be happening here, once-a-freakin-gain, is that Republicans were insistent on nickel-and-diming government offices when a Democratic administration was running things but now are doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the same spending when their own team gets the keys to each office.
And that seems to suggest that prior demands for government austerity and sequestration were, perhaps ... insincere.