It’s hardly a secret that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) likes to fly private. It was just last April when it came out that Sinema’s campaign had spent nearly $70,000 on charter flights over the last four years.
What hasn’t been reported, however, is Sinema’s penchant for using a very different source of funding to fly private: taxpayers.
Since 2020, Sinema has spent roughly $210,000 of her U.S. Senate office budget on private charter flights for herself and her staff, according to publicly available records—a high sum on an expense most lawmakers rarely, if ever, make.
Given that senators have limited annual budgets to fund their operations, Sinema’s use of private flights also raises questions about why she is prioritizing that expense over other essential functions of her office.
The Arizona senator has booked at least 11 private plane trips since 2020, with five of them coming in 2023, when she spent $116,000 on chartered air travel. According to the reports, nearly all of the flights were charted for travel within Arizona, as the senator and several of her staffers hit several cities and towns around the state on one- or two-day trips.