Aspen Institute employees contributed more than $800,000 to Democratic candidates and causes between 2017 and 2021, even as their employer got $38.2 million in federal funds and paid for hundreds of foreign junkets taken by members of Congress and their staffs.
Aspen and the other four groups topped a list of more than 700 third-party organizations that funded in excess of 8,000 junkets by 500 individual senators and representatives, including members of both political parties, during the five-year period.
All the trips were reported by the groups and the congressional figures, as required by federal law, but the fact that the junkets were paid for by groups that seek to influence federal policy in multiple ways, while at the same time getting money from Washington, presents significant potential for serious conflicts of interest, according to Open the Books founder and Chief Executive Officer Adam Andrzejewski.
“They are buying friends and buying influence. And it becomes an unholy alliance when the organizations paying for congressional travel are funded by taxpayers. Every single congressional trip paid for by an organization receiving taxpayer funding is a potential conflict of interest,” Andrzejewski told The Epoch Times.
“We were surprised by the sheer scale and scope of the paid-for travel. Congress loves to travel. In a recent 11-year period, members took 16,300 trips on the taxpayer dime and over the last five years took 8,000 trips paid for by third parties.”
The groups defend the practice by claiming that only private funds are involved in the junkets, Andrzejewski pointed out, but he said he’s skeptical of that explanation.
“Sure. All of us understand the meaning of the word ‘fungible,’” he said.
The solution is clear in Andrzejewski’s mind.
“If an entity is receiving federal funds, they can’t pay for congressional travel. Period,” he told The Epoch Times.
An Aspen Institute spokesman didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
Andrzejewski’s Chicago-based nonprofit research group has filed more than 40,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests at all levels of government in 2020 in its effort to make sure that “every dime is online, in real time” for American taxpayers.
To date, the group has posted the expenditures of all 50 states, and a host of large city and county governments, as well as for the federal government, thus making more than $6 trillion in public spending available to anybody with a computer and internet connection.
Aspen employees made 2,472 individual contributions to Act Blue—valued at a total of $230,359—during the five-year period. More than 200 Aspen employee contributions to PACs and other funds associated with Biden totaled $180,880.
Contributions to Democratic Party entities such as the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the DNC Services Corp. totaled more than $71,000.