Federal travel spending site takes flight

A new website aimed at tracking how much money agencies spend on federal travel just launched.

JunketSleuth.com will monitor through Freedom of Information Act requests official travel patterns of federal employees, allowing users to search government travel records. The site is a sister of BailoutSleuth.com, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative reporting site that tracks the flow of money allocated through the Troubled Asset Relief Program and other economic initiatives.

"The main reason we're doing this is transparency and openness in government," said Chris Carey, editor and president of BailoutSleuth.com, which runs JunketSleuth. "These are tough economic times, businesses are cutting [back], individuals are cutting back, and we're wondering, is the government cutting back on travel? By putting up the databases, we hope people can look for themselves."

The site, funded by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, asked nearly 60 agencies for data through FOIA requests and so far has received about 25 electronic data sets from agencies. Some databases will take time to clean up and ready for publication, Carey said.

The government also is slow to share the information, he said. "We're getting an awful lot of obstructionism getting these databases, which we consider to be public documents."

Carey said government employees sometimes wait until the last minute to book a trip they've known about, which can contribute to wasteful spending. For example, if an employee is traveling to Orlando, Fla., from Washington and procrastinates to buy airfare, it could cost nearly $1,000 round trip.

So far the site has posted travel spending only from the Health and Human Services Department. The site notes that nearly 400 HHS employees have racked up more than $100,000 each in taxpayer-funded travel since 2005. While some trips were mission critical, JunketSleuth's analysis found that more than half were for "mundane categories, such as meetings, conferences, training sessions and speeches."

The travel included all 50 states, four U.S. territories and 191 foreign countries, including more than 1,000 trips to China. Others traveled to lesser-known countries such as the Faroe Islands, Djibouti, the Maldive Islands, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Reunion Island and Tuvalu. HHS did not return a request for comment.

As the site receives and processes information, it will post more data. JunketSleuth will publish another set of data from the Merit Systems Protection Board this week, and an additional two or three data sets are close to publication, Carey said.