(The Center Square) – Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer spent $55,705 on a trip to Austria and Latvia in May of 2023 – her second taxpayer-funded travel this year which she says are trade missions.
It’s unclear how many people accompanied Whitmer, but the total flight cost totaled $43,537, followed by $4,805 of “miscellaneous” spending, $3,714 on hotels, $3,230 on transportation, and $418 on meals, according to records requests obtained from the Michigan Economic Development Corp.
Whitmer justified the more than 8,800-mile round trip by saying she would bring back financial interest in Michigan’s semiconductor, energy storage and electric vehicle sectors.
“Today, I continued my economic mission to go anywhere and compete with anyone to bring jobs and investment back home to Michigan,” Whitmer said then in a statement. “AVL List GmbH in Austria is one of the world’s leading mobility R&D firms and I know we can work together to increase their presence in Plymouth, Michigan.”
Whitmer’s office said she visited American troops while overseas but directed The Center Square to the MEDC for a comment about taxpayer’s return on investment on the trip. The MEDC did not responded by publication.
The trip follows Michigan taxpayers subsidizing private businesses with billions of dollars. Armed with the first Democratic political trifecta since 1980, Democrat lawmakers passed a record $82 billion budget for fiscal year 2024 that injected $318 million of public money into EVs.
John Mozena, president of the Center for Economic Accountability, a nonprofit organization for transparent economic development policy, said “expensive boondoggles” often “let politicians look to voters like they’re doing something about the state’s economy.”
“While trips like this and other kinds of economic development activities might be great at generating headlines, they’re terrible at generating any return on taxpayers’ investment or meaningful benefits to struggling communities,” Mozena wrote in an email.
Mozena said Michigan’s homegrown entrepreneurs and startups need a clear path to starting or running their company and called on Whitmer to remove barriers to doing business.
“History and common sense make it very clear that the way to create prosperity is to create an environment that makes it as easy and cost-effective as possible to start and run a good company that creates good jobs,” Mozena wrote. “Unfortunately, that’s hard work and it’s much easier for elected officials to just drop billion-dollar subsidies on big-name companies and then congratulate themselves at the press conferences for ‘creating jobs’ at ruinous taxpayer expense.”
In January, Whitmer spent $44,117 of taxpayer money on her five-day trip to Davos, Switzerland speaking at the World Economic Forum on a panel about “The Return of Manufacturing.” Her office said the trip brought back a $400 million hydrogen investment.
In May, the Office of Future Mobility and Electrification spent nearly $65,000 on a three-day trip to Israel.
Michigan is spending record amounts in an attempt to reverse population loss. One report estimates another 270,000 people will leave the state by 2050.
