There Were No $16 Muffins

The Republicans have something new to whine about. It seems that the Department of Justice held a legal training conference and had some refreshments at that conference. The hotel providing those refreshments listed the costs in just a few categories and that made it look, at least to one nut in the federal government, as though they had paid $16 each for muffins. The truth is that the DOJ spent $14.74 per attendee for food and beverages (and you just can't squeeze a $16 muffin into that figure). Here is how the website of Mother Jones explains it:

So did DOJ really pay $16 for muffins? Of course not. In fact, it's obvious that someone quite carefully calculated the amount they were allowed to spend and then gave the hotel a budget. The hotel agreed, but for some reason decided to divide up the charges into just a few categories instead of writing a detailed invoice for every single piece of food they provided. 


This is unremarkable. In fact, I'm here to tell you that this happens All. The. Time. I've been involved in what feels like a thousand conferences of this kind, and I'd be shocked if it happened any other way. Hell, I'm surprised DOJ even got that much of a breakdown. Far more commonly, your event person negotiates what kind of refreshments you'll get, and the invoice ends up looking something like this:


Refreshment table (bev/morn/aft) — 5 days....................$39,500


None of this is to say that DOJ didn't overspend on its conferences. In fact, it sounds like they did — though in some cases this was just an artifact of applying overhead costs to the food instead of accounting for it separately. But the $16 muffin? That's a myth. It'll never die now that it's been delivered to posterity thanks to some enthusiast in the OIG who broke out a calculator and mistakenly assumed they could calculate actual costs this way, but it's still a myth.

But the Republicans don't really care much about the truth. They want heads to roll at the Department of Justice for buying those muffins -- and they'll probably still be talking about those muffins years from now. I guess they need something to try and mask their own fiscal incompetence.