Donald Trump has already spent $10.7 million of taxpayer money playing golf

Somehow, the expense has flown under the radar of the waste, fraud and abuse experts at DOGE

 Donald Trump has already spent $10.7 million of taxpayer money to play golf since retaking the White House last month, an expense that appears to have escaped the attention of his “Department of Government Efficiency” waste, fraud and abuse hunters.

The golf-related expenses — which are likely to recur most weekends while Trump is in office — have somehow flown below the radar of Elon Musk and his “high-IQ” team, as Trump calls them, of programmers who are ransacking their way through the federal budget and labelling items they do not like or appear not to understand as “fraud.”

Even as they point out five- and six-figure contracts and grants as wasteful, they have ignored each of Trump’s seven-figure golf trips to date. A search of posts by DOGE on Musk’s social media website once known as Twitter found zero mentions of the word “golf.”

A senior White House official directed questions about DOGE — which Trump created by executive order on his first day in office — to the White House press office. Neither that office, however, nor multiple officials in the Trump White House responded to HuffPost’s queries about the four golf trips.

There has been a golf trip each of the four weekends since Trump came back to the presidency on Jan. 20, and he has now played golf at his own properties on nine of his first 30 days in office.

“It’s clear that when the Trump administration considers the definition of corruption and wasteful spending, it doesn’t count spending that ends up in the president’s pockets,” said Jordan Libowitz of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “By visiting his for-profit businesses roughly a third of his days in office, Trump is directing government spending to follow him there, and profiting off the trip.”

HuffPost’s $10.7 million tally is based on a 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office breaking down the costs of Trump’s first trips to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida, country club, during his first term. The GAO calculated a total cost of $3,383,250 for each trip. About one-third of that was the flight cost of Air Force One for the round trip, with additional expenses for flying down vehicles, including two presidential limousines, for Trump’s motorcade and reimbursing the Coast Guard for stationing a gunship in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast and heavily armed boats in the Intracoastal Waterway.

Those costs are based on 2017 dollars and are likely somewhat higher today.

HuffPost was then able to extrapolate those figures to derive totals for his other golf destinations, including courses he owns in Doral, Florida; Palos Verdes, California; Bedminster, New Jersey; and his courses in Ireland and Scotland.

“By visiting his for-profit businesses roughly a third of his days in office, Trump is directing government spending to follow him there, and profiting off the trip.”

– Jordan Libowitz, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

In Trump’s first term, his golf expenses totalled $152 million over four years, for a total of 293 golf days at his own resorts.

Thus far in his second term, Trump has played golf at his own resorts each of the four weekends he has been in office. Three of the four have been at his course in West Palm Beach during his Mar-a-Lago visits, although the golf-related total for one of the trips is reduced by about $546,000 because the trip included a leg to New Orleans to participate in the Super Bowl. The total for the first trip, to Doral, is also less than a pure golf vacation would have cost because it included a segment out to Los Angeles and Las Vegas on official White House business. HuffPost is not counting those flight costs toward his golf total.

“It would be one thing if he went to Camp David every few days to hit golf balls. It’s hard to see this as anything other than using the presidency to prop up his businesses,” Libowitz said.

Trump allies spent former President Joe Biden’s term criticizing him for spending most of his weekends at his Delaware homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach and complaining about the taxpayer expenses.

Source: Huffpost