Update: Ben Carson Won’t Get $31K Dining Set After All

The Guardian reported this morning that Ben Carson has cancelled an order for a $31,000 dining room set that is separate from the $165,000 (“for lounge furniture”) he has already spent on redecorating his office as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.  Apparently, according to department rules, he was only supposed to spend $5,000 on redecorating his office– the cost, perhaps, of a fairly standard nice new desk (“not even enough to buy a decent chair” as Mr. Trump’s appointee complained).  Mr. Carson doesn’t have much work to do as Secretary in any case, except perhaps to study on what the Department was created for and why Mr. Trump is cutting its budget by 14% (perhaps it is abandoning any commitment to working on the homeless problem.)  Congress has been prodded into investigating Mr. Carson’s HUD after a whistleblower alleged that she was demoted to a job that apparently had nothing but a title and a salary, no job description, for complaining about the way the budget for redecorating was side-stepped– and for discovering a $10m budget shortfall as well as exposing mishandling of Freedom of Information Act requests.

All this makes one wonder what sort of meetings are supposed to be conducted in Mr. Carson’s new office– dinners, lounge parties, or ?

Parenthetically, Ben Carson is titled “Mr. Carson” following the British tradition of naming surgeons “Mr.” instead of “Dr.”

(photo– not of Mr. Carson’s new office– courtesy of pixabay.com and maryrodgers1982)