Article from Fox News by Robert Gearty.

An air base’s penchant for pricey coffee cups has garnered the attention of a United States senator, who is demanding — and receiving — an explanation for the purchase of beverage tumblers that cost $1,280 each.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned the procurement in an Oct. 2 letter to Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson. Grassley’s letter cited a September 26 Fox News article reporting that in the past three years the 60th Aerial Squadron at Travis Air Force base in California purchased dozens of cups for nearly $56,000. The cups can reheat liquids on board the Air Force’s fleet of cargo aircraft.

The squadron reported that the cups have handles that break easily when dropped. Since replacement handles aren’t available, the whole cup has to be replaced. In 2016, the squadron said that it purchased 10 hot cups for $6,930 and that the price for each cup surged from $693 to $1,220 in 2018, resulting in a total expenditure of $32,000 for 25 cups. The math may have been off. That’s actually a price of $1,280 for each of the 25 cups.

She told Grassley that the Air Force has purchased 391 of these items at a total cost of $326,785 since 2016 — an average per-item cost of around $835.

Read the entire article at Fox News.

Image Credit: By Gerard van der Schaaf (05-5140) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons