PrivateJetGate has me so pissed at these assholes sense of entitlement, I have to respond.
As a former government employee whose job required travel from time to time, I would like the public to know that this shit is not normal. I worked for the government over a period of more than 30 years not including my military time, and the federal government as a whole is very frugal with Taxpayer's money when it comes to work related travel. The federal government used to negotiate 'government airfares' with the various airlines for government employees on official travel on an annual or biannual basis of some kind. I don't recall which exactly. Employees usually get Travel Orders for the area being visited and they go into the travel system (for me it was DTS, the Defense Travel System) and make reservations.
Now the airlines would only set aside a limited number of seats on their flights at the government rate because Government employees pay that government rate whether they book a day in advance or 2 months in advance. So when you go into the travel system you pick a date and flight and then go through this whole process to finish making your reservation by putting in a lot of information about yourself. Consider yourself very lucky to get to the end of this process and there still be that government seat available. I don't mean a specific seat on that aircraft, I mean on of the allotted government seats the contracted airlines set aside. If that seat is not available you have to go back to the beginning and pick another flight. It goes without saying that the flight you picked in the first place was the one most feasible for your travel schedule. So now you have to go back and pick another flight, either an earlier flight than planned or a less convenient one with a layover in some city rather than a nonstop. You might have to go back and start over several times before you get a confirmed reservation, but it goes faster each time because you've already put in certain information that is already there and you don't have to repeat it. It can be an exercise in futility, but you eventually get used to it. Sometimes you keep starting over because you run out of flights and then you have to call the Travel Agency that we deal with. That is usually a last resort because your government agency got charged $50 for each reservation booked by the Travel Agency, plus the original flight cost. If the TA booked a round trip, the government was billed $100 plus the cost of the flight, and they hated to see those TA charges so you had to document why you had to go through the TA. It also was a good thing to talk to your Supervisor to let he or she know before you called the TA because you were going to be incurring this added expense and they *the supervisor) are going to have to approve it. What usually happens, I'm guessing, is that the TA is probably going to have you placed in a Standby Status (something you can't do yourself) with a very high priority because you don't get a seat assignment at the time the reservation is made. Mind you I'm flying coach, but this is the life of government employee.
So this is the life of a civil servant up to my pay grade which was a GS-13 when I left. I'm sure that there are probably different rules for heads of Departments and Agencies, but I wasn't one of those, so I can't speak of that which I don't know of. Political Appointees now, seem to be a whole different animal altogether.
During the news reports of PrvateJetGate, they were always comparing these White House Appointees incurred costs to the cost of a First Class Ticket. Something us lowly pee-ons could probably only dream of. There's an Airline commercial on TV that states, "First Class exists to remind you that you are not in First Class". 
That is the story of a lowly Government Employee. I can't imagine the mindset, whereby overnight, a former member of Congress goes from government airfare rates to private jets in the tens of thousands of dollars for a single trip. I hope there's a special place in hell for their hypocrisy. Not that I begrudge them a comfortable flight when conducting government business, because I didn't get it. It's the hypocrisy of such wasteful government spending at Taxpayer's Expense, while under the guise of being a "Conservative",` and every Taxpayer has a right to be pissed.
= new reply since forum marked as read
