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  • 2016-10-28 (xsd:date)
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  • Obama Golf Outing with Tiger Woods Cost Nearly $4 Million? (en)
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  • On 26 October 2016 the Washington Times published an article reporting that President Obama's 2013 outing with golfing legend Tiger Woods cost the American taxpayer nearly $4 million: Although the article contained hyperlinks to what may have looked to be citations supporting their story, those links led only to general and unrelated articles on the paper's own web site. Curiously absent was a link to the easily accessible Government Accountability Office (GAO) report about the 2013 golf outing or any information that would serve to substantiate the claims made. The February 2013 vacation during which President Obama played golf with Tiger Woods was widely reported, and the GAO did publish a report titled Estimated Costs for a Specific Presidential Trip to Illinois and Florida dated simply October 2016 [PDF]. The words golf and Tiger Woods appeared nowhere in that GAO document, which began with an explanation of why the study was conducted and an overview of President Obama's activities between 15 February 2013 and 18 February 2013: To the column's left was a section summarizing the GAO's findings: The audit was requested by Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso in November 2013. In a letter attributed to Barrasso (the full text of which was unavailable), the Senator was quoted as saying of the request: Barrasso referenced the cost of the trip as a potential offset to the federal deficit, which just prior to his November 2013 request news outlets reported had fallen to $680 billion in Fiscal Year 2013. Were President Obama's travels in that three-day period rounded up to $4 million, that cost would account for 0.00059 percent of the 2013 federal deficit. In a response to Barrasso dated 11 October 2016, the GAO reported: According to the GAO report on which the articles about President Obama's alleged $4 million golf outing with Tiger Woods were based, the costs of President Obama's trips to Illinois and Florida in February 2013 were about $3.6 million, of which about $2.8 million in costs were incurred by DOD and $0.77 million by DHS. The total sum referenced in the $4 million number was not only rounded up from the $3.6 million estimate, but it combined the costs of an official business trip as well as a brief vacation in Florida. Although President Obama met and played golf with Tiger Woods during the second leg of his travel, that outing did not itself cost $3.6 million dollars (or any specific amount of money cited in the GAO audit). Any presidential travel is necessarily costly in general (from an accounting standpoint, at least), but we note in a separate article that estimated expenses for presidential air travel are based on an accounting formula that is often highly misleading about the true costs involved. (en)
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