Out Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) is catching flak for spending around $210,000 of taxpayer money to travel on private jets since 2020, which is a lot more than her peers usually spend on the luxury.
U.S. senators have annual budgets to fund their offices, and Sinema spending a large part of hers on charter flights is raising hackles about how she could have better spent that money to serve her constituents.
Examining public records, The Daily Beast found that she took at least 11 trips in private planes in the last four years. Five were in 2023, and she spent $116,000 on those flights. Almost all of the flights were for travel within the state of Arizona.
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She also took one private jet from D.C. to Arizona during that period as well. Federal lawmakers usually fly commercially when they travel between D.C. and their home states. That August 8, 2023, flight from D.C. to the Grand Canyon for her and four staffers cost $50,250 and used a company that specializes in luxury flight experiences.
For comparison, the other senator from Arizona – Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) – didn’t use his Senate budget for private jets at all, and he travels to many of the same places that Sinema does.
“This is one of those things that does raise the question of, is this the best way to manage the budget?” said Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “Could she be doing more for the state otherwise?”
The Senate budgeted $4.1 million in 2023 for all of Sinema’s Senate office expenses, including the salaries of her staff, her travel to and from D.C., and other office expenses, and there is no official Senate rule banning her from using that money on private jets. But just the five chartered flights in 2023 alone amount to nearly 3% of her yearly budget and were a greater expense than the annual salary of most members of her staff.
Libowitz said the money Sinema has spent on private jets “plays into this larger thing we’ve seen with her, where she tends to go right up to the line of what she’s able to do with spending other people’s money in the way she would best prefer.”
“She’s seemed pretty good at finding the ways to do it that people are going to see and are not going to like but, generally, don’t rise to the level of being an actual legal problem.”
Not only that, but private jet use has also often been used to attack politicians. For example, out Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been repeatedly criticized by the right for his use of “private jets,” even though there is no evidence that he ever actually flew in one. Conservatives even attacked him for flying in a commercial airline and falling asleep.