Portman: Environmental Protection Agency spends millions on luxury furniture

U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) released the following statement Monday in a monthly series highlighting Washington’s wasteful spending during a time of record debt and deficits.
 
With the current national debt at $18 trillion, it is difficult to believe the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the audacity to spend tens of millions of dollars on furniture. According to the Washington Times, the EPA spent a total of $92.4 million of taxpayer money over the past decade on high-end luxury office furniture. This amounts to roughly $6,000 on furniture for each of the agency’s 15,492 employees. 
 
Despite our federal fiscal catastrophe, the EPA chose to decorate its office space by contracting not just with any office supplier, but high end retailers—one of which even has a display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City featuring more than 40 pieces of furniture.  
 

[[In-content Ad]]Some of the luxury furniture the EPA purchased includes: a Galerie lounge chair with Galerie settee ($2,641 per set), an executive desk ($3,959), a Wood Racetrack Conference Table ($25,751), four “Park Ave Arm Lounge Chairs” ($4,083), a Herman Miller chair with “adjustable arms, swivel, lumbar, caster and tilt” ($4,047), a hexagonal table ($5,539), hickory chairs ($6,391), and perhaps most astonishing, a pencil drawer for $813.57.
 
“Merely strolling federal buildings is sometimes all it takes to discover government waste. Such is the case here. It does not take much to walk down EPA’s hallways and see the outrageous spending on lavish furniture,” Portman said. “Government agencies must be held accountable, and there is no excuse for failing to ensure the government is operating as efficiently and spending taxpayer money wisely.”