According to data from former CBS correspondent Mark Knoller, the president, Joe Biden, has made 57 trips to his home state of Delaware, spanning all or part of 185 days. So this means that, since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, as per a report, the president’s frequent trips to Delaware have cost taxpayers at least $11 million, as reported by Fox News.
Taxpayer dollars to fund costs associated with the use of either Air Force One or Marine One are required by the trips Biden has, and security costs for the Secret Service as well. The President often likes to spend some time in Delaware at his homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach.
Between the White House or Joint Base Andrews and Delaware, Biden has made 101 flights, according to Knoller. 71 out of those 101 were flights using Marine One, while 30 were using Air Force One. Most of these trips the president took involved direct travel between the White House and Delaware. Knoller served as a source of information for reporters for decades, and even the White House itself. He has kept careful records of various White House statistics.
The Marine One helicopters, that the president used, cost between $17,065 and $20,206 per hour, according to public documents from the Department of Defense comptroller, and the helicopter trip between the White House and locations in Delaware takes roughly an hour. according to the president’s schedule.
And also according to the president’s schedule, the trip to Delaware takes roughly 30 minutes with Air Force One, while operational costs are $177,843 per hour. When we do the math, the conclusion is that this puts the total operational costs for Biden’s trips at about $4 million. A Secret Service cost of $1.96 million on the president’s first 16 trips to Delaware is also shown in the documents obtained by the New York Post last year.
To the president’s now 57 trips, a per-trip cost from these data is applied, which leaves an approximate $7 million tab for taxpayers. But this is not the end of the calculations, as many other miscellaneous costs do not tally the $11 million receipt for Biden’s Delaware trips. It is probably a significant underestimate. Accommodations for staff who accompany him, spending for additional helicopters that travel along with him, and travel to or from military airports before or after an Air Force One flight, were all not included in the $11 million receipt.
But wait, there’s more! 16 flights to Delaware from states where the president was conducting official business were also not included, as the travel from those destinations may have not been much more expensive than if Biden had returned to the White House, continued the Fox News report.
From 1973 to 2009, when Biden was a senator, every day that the Senate was in session, he would take Amtrak from Delaware to Washington, D.C. “Amtrak Joe” is the nickname he earned from having this habit. 8,200 round trips were included in this travel, and more than 2 million miles, as he claims. For much of that time from Delaware to Washington and back, the ticket was less than $100. But now that Joe runs the White House, Biden’s desire to spend as much time in Delaware as possible is costing taxpayers well more than $200,000 each time.
Sometimes, Biden’s stay in his home state extends beyond the usual presidential weekend schedule, as often, he already leaves for Delaware on a Thursday, in order to work from his home on Friday, and then he stays for the weekend and usually departs back to Washington on Monday morning as opposed to Sunday night.
Although Biden travels home more often than the former president, Donald Trump, did when he was the president, the distance from Washington to Delaware is shorter than Trump’s trips to Florida or New Jersey. Trump also faced criticism at the time for his regular, expensive travel to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Everybody needs a cool-off and wants their weekend to feel comfortable, but the fact is that the president has other, quite comfortable options for the weekend he can use. For example, the White House itself is one of the nation’s most beautiful mansions, but even if he really wants to go away from the everyday hustle, he can also treat himself and go to the country retreat at Camp David, which is only a half-hour chopper ride away, which is less than when he goes to Delaware. But Biden was at Camp David only 19 times so far, which is far less often than he goes to Delaware.