this is where he goes to see his family. he brings people down there. this is part of being president. reporter: but critics, including a conservative budget watch dog group, says the trips cost too much. there s room for improvement, and the president would do well to figure out way to save money for the taxpayer in the white house operation. reporter: every time the president visits, how much does it cost? it s about $60,000 a day. reporter: sheri rick bradshaw says it s added up to morehan $2 million since the augution. we can sustain this for a while longer. if it does many more months, we re going to have to make some decisions on talking with the county and make get some contingency funds. reporter: in eight years, barack obama s total draft costs were at least $97 million. at the current rate, president trump s travel could well exceed that. but what this adds up to is a
reporter: palm beach county sheriff said it added up to more than $million sin the inauguration. we can sustain this a while loer. if it goes in more months, we have to make some decisions on talking with the county and make get some contingency funds. reporter: in the eight years of his contingency, barack oklahoma s travel costs were $97 million. at the current rate, president trump s could well exceed that. what does this really adds up to, ethics watchdogs say, is the president spending lots of taxpayer money to conduct presidential business while promoting his family s business at the same time. this is a privately owned club that, for all intents and purposes, was just another golf property in florida before. that almost now is something that americans immediately recognize. imagine what you would have to pay to get that kind of brand recognition. that s extraordinary. at the request of senate democrats, the gao will review the mar-a-lago travel to find
molly henneberg live in d.c. with more on the story. reporter: hi, jenna. here is what is comes down to congress controls the money for the city of washington d.c. locally elected leaders in this very blue democratic city are pressing president obama and senate democrats to loosen those purse strings during the shutdown. specifically, they want the president to withdraw his veto threat of a house bill that would allah d.c. to use its tax money as generated by people who live in d.c. to fund city operations, even while the federal government is shut down. and that is what prompted non-voting delegate, eleanor holmes norton to take on the president yesterday, interrupting him a few times we re told to make her case. holmes tells fox, the president s point of view i had to take issue with. the city is running out of its contingency funds. d.c. mayor, democrat vincent gray, also took up the cause yesterday on the steps of the capitol with senate democratic
fund from different places. as more and more pile up and gets up to 15, 16, maybe 20 or more states there is real question whether there is any way they can get this done. the logistical challenge in terms of staffing getting this done makes me very skeptical they will meet the timeline and these things will be up and running by 2014. then really all bets are off. you will be required to buy a plan from a exchange that may or may not exist in your state. it is unclear how that will be interpreted. what will they do? if hhs has to set up exchanges in every state and they don t have the money, where do they get the money and is it from the federal taxpayer? there are only two possibilities and they can go to congress to appropriate fund to do this. that is very unlikely to work with republicans running the house of representatives. they have to somehow reprogram uncommitted funds elsewhere in the government and there are a couple of contingency funds set up in the health care law the
nondiscretionary spending, put a hiring freeze on nonsecurity personnel. and when we re talking about government spending, we ve got to talk about waste, fraud and abuse. a recent report came out and sid that we spend over $1 billion in medicaid waste, fraud and abuse. we re talking about pharmacies billing for prescriptions to dead people. we re talking about home health care companies billing for patients who were in the hospital. senator coburn put out a report called schoolhouse pork that disclosed millions of dollars that were supposed to go to education funding that instead went to special favors. special favors are something that my opponent knows very much about, because he created 12 contingency funds so that he could pay out favors to special