Ben Carson's schedule shows Friday trips to Florida, lunch with My Pillow founder

[DonViejo]

March 18, 2019, 4:23 AM EDT

By Laura Strickler

WASHINGTON — Ben Carson's daily schedule from 2017 shows a HUD secretary who held senior staff meetings once a week, lunched with the author of "Chicken Soup for the Soul" and the founder of My Pillow, and left work before 2 p.m. on some Fridays to fly to his Florida mansion.

A list of appointments for a 31-week period shows that for about half of the Fridays Carson worked a traditional eight or nine-hour day. For five of the Fridays he was off or had no appointments. For five more Fridays he left before 2 p.m. to get to the airport to fly to South Florida, where he owns a house valued at $4.3 million. For the remaining six, he had no scheduled appointments past 3 p.m. In all, he made a dozen weekend trips to South Florida during the 31 weeks.

The calendar also indicates that in 2017, HUD's senior staff huddled just once a week. Calendars previously posted by three other federal departments — Transportation, Treasury, and Labor — during the Trump administration show daily senior team meetings or multiple meetings a week.

Three different 2017 calendars from Carson's office were obtained by the government watchdog group American Oversight through a federal lawsuit and provided to NBC News. NBC News recreated his schedule for the period covering April 7, 2017 to Nov. 1, 2017 using listings from the three calendars — one of them Carson's, the others from two of his assistants.

American Oversight filed its first Freedom of Information Act request for Carson's calendar in November 2017. When the group's request was denied, it sued HUD for the documents in March 2018. HUD then provided the three different calendars to American Oversight with months of appointments out of sequence. An example of what American Oversight Executive Director Austin Evers called a "jumble" is below:



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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/ben-carson-s-schedule-shows-friday-trips-florida-lunch-my-n983526

[uponit7771]

1. When all is said in done the grifting will be twice as bad as anything publicly reported

[sarcasmo]

7. Agreed. Every department head Trump put into place was in on the grift.

[maxrandb]

2. Let me guess

The My Pillow piece of shit won a contract to provide his lousy foam pillows to all federal housing units?

[SWBTATTReg]

3. Never seen the likes of so many lazy a&&es in my life, and repugs are the ones who ...

supposedly are pro work, pro business, etc.? Yeah, right. What a joke. I'd fire every damned one of them right now if any of these scumbags worked for my business.

It looks like all they want to do is spend all of their time in 'executive time', e.g., play golf, etc.

These people had better not preach to me about work ethics, how costly it is to run a business, how hard it is to pay more than a minimum wage to workers, how expensive medical insurance is for them to provide to their workers, etc. They've lost every bit of respect from me on ALL topics.

[struggle4progress]

4. "Pay me big bucks for not doing squat!"

Ben Carson’s HUD: Political loyalty required, no experience necessary

By Tracy Jan September 20, 2018
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded promotions and pay increases to five political operatives with no housing policy experience within their first months on the job, demonstrating what government watchdogs and career staff describe as a premium put on loyalty over expertise.

The raises, documented in a Washington Post analysis of HUD political hires, resulted in annual salaries between $98,000 and $155,000 for the five appointees, all of whom had worked on Donald Trump’s or Ben Carson’s presidential campaigns. Three of them did not list bachelor’s degrees on their résumés.

The political hires were among at least 24 people without evident housing policy experience who were appointed to the best-paying political positions at HUD, an agency charged with serving the poorest Americans. They account for a third of the 70 HUD appointees at the upper ranks of the federal government, with salaries above $94,000, according to the Post review of agency records ...

[Totally Tunsie]

5. Mnuchin needs to be looked at next.

He's another who knows how to scam the system, and he has a trophy wife to dress as well. I wouldn't trust this guy to walk my dog.

[dalton99a]

6. Kick

[Maru Kitteh]

8. The less work this cabinet does the better. That said,

how on Earth does he justify spending our money to meet the pillow dullard?