Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price tendered his resignation.
Recent revelations that Price had been traveling the country via chartered plane and the resultant media stink led to Price’s resignation.
Price promised to pay back the cost of chartered flights and travel commercially moving forward, but the damage was done.
From CNN:
Tom Price, the embattled health and human services secretary, resigned Friday in the midst of a scandal over his use of private planes, a storm that enraged President Donald Trump and undercut his promise to bring accountability to Washington.Price’s departure came as he’s being investigated by the department’s inspector general for using private jets for multiple government business trips, even to fly distances often as short as from Washington to Philadelphia. The cost for the trips ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.The scandal infuriated Trump, who viewed the controversy as a needless distraction from his agenda. Over the course of the week, Trump fumed to aides about Price’s flights, which he deemed “stupid,” according to multiple sources. Instead of moving past the storm, Price’s offer to reimburse the government for only a fraction of the flights’ costs enraged Trump further.Speaking less than an hour before the resignation was announced, Trump bemoaned the optics of the matter, which he said obscured what otherwise had been a cost-saving tenure.”I was disappointed because I didn’t like it, cosmetically or otherwise. I was disappointed,” Trump said.
A disappointing and unforced error from an otherwise stellar public servant.
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