New York Magazine

No Brown-Bagging on the Big Bird
❧ Air Force One food bills add up.

December 23, 2012
By Reid Cherlin

After four years of laboring over bailouts and health-care reform and confirmation fights, White House aides heading for the exits in the coming weeks will face one final hurdle—a checkout process resembling a bureaucratic scavenger hunt. Each outbound staffer is presented with a checklist that must be signed by eleven different administrative offices in three different buildings. Laptops must be returned to Operations in Room 1; notebooks and papers go to Room 85 for archiving; official passports are to be surrendered at 1800 G Street. “If you’re going to cry, it usually happens when you turn in your BlackBerry,” an Ops official told me when I went through my own checkout two years ago. But it’s the next-to-last task that can be most daunting: settling your meal tab from Air Force One.

It is a curious fact of White House life that when flying on the Big Bird—a conveyance whose $180,000-per-hour bill is footed by the taxpayer when the plane is on official business—travelers do not get free meals. On foreign trips, the State Department foots the hospitality bill, and during campaign jaunts, Obama for America paid for anyone designated as political staff. But for the sizable retinue of functionaries on typical domestic flights, it’s their personal credit cards that will be charged—automatically, per ethics regulations, even if a staffer choses not to eat. Captive political travel can get pricey rather quickly, as reporters who covered the Romney campaign have learned, but this is particularly a problem on Air Force One owing to the fulsomeness of military hospitality. A late-night snack of “sliders” could well turn out to be full-scale bacon cheeseburgers. Lunch might come with a coupé of ice cream...

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