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NASA wasted millions on routine travel
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-10-03 10:39
NASA wasted millions of dollars over a two-year period by shunning commercial
airline flights and instead using its own planes for routine travel, according
to a government report provided to The Associated Press on Thursday.
NASA Administrator
Michael Griffin speaks at a news conference at NASA headquarters in
Washington September 19, 2005. [Reuters] | The Government Accountability Office found that NASA spent at least five
times more by flying employees on its own planes in fiscal 2003 and 2004,
compared with the cost of commercial coach tickets. The extra spending totaled
about $20 million.
The GAO also reported that 86 percent of NASA's own passenger flights in
those two years -- or about seven of every eight flights -- involved routine
business trips prohibited by rules governing what sorts of flights federal
workers can take on government aircraft.
Some travel examples cited in the report include meetings, speeches,
executive retreats and even the inauguration of Florida's governor and the 60th
anniversary ceremony of the Pearl Harbor attack.
It was the government's latest criticism of NASA's use of passenger planes.
Twice during the 1990s, the space agency's own inspector general office found
faults with the travel system.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who requested the GAO investigation, said she is
troubled that "this abuse of the aircraft has been going on for years." Her
office provided a copy of the GAO report to the AP on Thursday, a day before its
public release.
"It's frustrating that it's taken two (inspector general) audits, a GAO
investigation and the threat of a congressional oversight hearing to get an
agency to comply with its obligations to the taxpayers," Collins said in a phone
interview.
"In the environment we're in right now with tight federal budgets and the
demands of responding to Hurricane Katrina, it is particularly disturbing to
learn that a federal agency is not being a more careful steward of the
taxpayers' dollars. There's also a waste of fuel here, too."
Collins, who heads the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs, said she has talked to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who took
over the space agency just this year, and he has promised to make changes.
"Our goal is to fully comply with federal-wide aircraft management policy,"
Griffin assured the GAO in a letter included in the report.
Griffin's predecessor, Sean O'Keefe, now Louisiana State University's
chancellor, was in charge of NASA during the period covered by the GAO
investigation. O'Keefe is not mentioned by name in the report; former and
current senior NASA officials told the AP earlier this year he was being
investigated personally for potential misuse of government planes and taking too
many expensive getaways with his staff.
The GAO noted that while most NASA air travel is on commercial airlines,
employees took at least 1,188 flights using space agency planes during the
two-year period under review. Collins said she asked the GAO to subtract flights
related to the 2003 Columbia tragedy.
Even so, "we're talking about almost 1,200 flights during fiscal years 2003
and 2004 that are questionable flights," she said.
In 2003, NASA owned and operated 85 planes valued at $362 million -- 53
planes to support the space shuttle, space station and astronaut programs, 25
for research and development, and seven for passenger travel. The space agency
has owned a small fleet of passenger planes since its inception in
1958.
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