Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump became notorious for flying from event to event in his giant “TRUMP”-branded private jet, touching down in the middle of the country to give campaign speeches before jetting back home to Trump Tower to spend the night in the sanctity of his pink-marbled condo. Increasingly, his underlings seem to be enjoying the same sort of perk. But instead of financing their own travels, they are leaning on government money instead. First, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was caught flying on a military plane to Fort Knox, Kentucky, during the solar eclipse. Then Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in luxury jet travel to private islands and lunches with his son, was outed for similar grifting. On Thursday night, Ryan Zinke, a former congressman and now the secretary of the Interior, was reported to have taken a trip to the Virgin Islands and to his second home in Montana, both times flying on chartered jets.

Much like Price's and Mnuchin's, Zinke’s private trips often happened to occur around the same time as government-funded work tied to his position as head of Interior, which often coincided with weekend trips to his homes in Montana and Santa Barbara. The Washington Post, which got its hands on Zinke’s travel calendar, reported that on one trip to Nevada, Zinke initially flew to Reno to speak at a dinner at Lake Tahoe hosted by a Koch brothers-backed group, then flew on Southwest Airlines to give a speech to Las Vegas's new National Hockey League team, owned by the chairman of Fidelity National Financial, whose employees and associated political action committees had donated nearly $200,000 to Zinke's two congressional campaigns. Finally, he hopped a flight on a charter jet that cost $12,375 to Montana, where he was scheduled to speak at the Western Governors Association—and where he owns a home—with the taxpayers picking up the tab. (Commercial flights on this route, The Post found, cost as little as $300.) Between these trips, the Post reported, Zinke conducted one piece of government business in Nevada: he went to “the tiny rural Nevada town of Pahrump to announce a routine local funding grant from Congress to rural communities.”

At another point, Zinke, whose boss is proposing massive cuts to the Interior Department’s budget and a thorough gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, flew his official entourage to the Virgin Islands on private jets for what looked like a three-day vacation, complete with “an official snorkeling tour of the nearby Buck Island Reef National Monument, a centennial ceremony for a local holiday celebrating the islands’ transfer to the United States, and a viewing of a military parade,” reported the Post, although he managed to attend a Virgin Islands G.O.P. event. A similar trip to Montana had Zinke making obligatory face time at a hot-springs complex, a "snow-removal crew meet and greet," and a rock-climbing wall before spending an evening and the next day with wealthy donors to raise funds for G.O.P. Senator Steve Daines.

In a statement, Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift said that the chartered flights had been approved by ethics officers and purchased only when commercial flights were unavailable, though she did not document these claims. This did not sit well with Aaron Weiss, media director for the environmental advocacy group Center for Western Priorities. “Secretary Zinke’s entire Nevada trip appears to be a flimsy excuse for a political event in Tahoe and a thank-you dinner with his biggest campaign bundler,” he told the Post. “There was no legitimate reason for the secretary to be there in the first place.”