Marco Rubio travel to son’s football games cost taxpayers over $1.2 million, report says
The secretary of state has flown to Gainesville 23 times on military planes, the report says, and 15 of those trips were personal. His office says he will keep going.
WASHINGTON, Nov 12 – Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spent more than $1.2 million in public money on military flights to watch his son play college football, a Washington Post report published on Wednesday said. Ethics watchdogs are now asking whether so many trips were needed.
Rubio’s son Anthony plays running back for the University of Florida Gators. He joined the team as a walk-on, meaning without a sports scholarship. Anthony joined the Gators before the 2023 season and has spent the majority of his career on the scout team.
The Post found that Rubio attended at least 10 games over the past two seasons, including five this fall. It reported that he made 23 trips to Gainesville on military aircraft, 15 of which were personal.
The newspaper calculated the cost using the Defense Department’s published hourly rates for different military aircraft. It said the flights alone cost more than $1.2 million.
Rubio is not allowed to fly on regular airlines. Security rules bar him from doing so, along with the defense secretary and the heads of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. But the Post said his use of government planes appears to go far beyond that of the people who held the job before him.
His most recent trip was on November 7, when he flew to Gainesville aboard an Air Force C-37, an aircraft commonly used to transport senior officials. He watched from the sidelines as the Gators lost 23-7 to Oklahoma. Anthony Rubio did not play in the game.
Rubio defended the trips in a statement to the Post. He said he will keep trying to attend as many family events as he can.
“Important to me personally and to my family,” Rubio said of the events he tries to attend.
Anthony Rubio, a senior, has played in only four games in four years at the university, two of them this season, the Guardian reported, citing ESPN. His one college touchdown came in a bowl game in 2024. Anthony Rubio, a walk-on to the team, scored on a late nine-yard run with just over a minute remaining to extend Florida’s lopsided lead to 33-8.
Officials who use military aircraft for personal travel must reimburse the government for the cost of an equivalent economy-class airline ticket. That is far less than the real cost of the flight. Rubio and the State Department would not say how much he has paid back, the Post said.
Cynthia Brown, a senior ethics lawyer at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Post that the trips look more like a bad image than a breach of the rules.
“More of an optics issue than a violation,” Brown said.
Still, she said the travel deserves a closer look. She asked whether an official is truly looking after public money if travel starts to harm trust in their work. And she noted that Rubio alone decides how often and how far he travels.
The Post, citing two former officials, reported that Antony Blinken, who served as secretary of state under President Joe Biden, used government planes for personal trips only a few times a year.
There is also history to this issue. When Rubio was a Republican senator from Florida, he called for an inquiry into former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s use of government jets for personal travel. At the time, Rubio wrote that taxpayers had a right to know whether senior officials were wasting public money.
The department’s internal watchdog later cleared Buttigieg, who had taken eight trips at a total cost of $59,000.
The State Department pushed back against the criticism. Dylan Johnson, an assistant secretary of state, wrote on social media that comparing Rubio with Buttigieg was “moronic.”
He said the secretary of state, like the president and certain other senior officials, is required to travel on military aircraft, maintain access to secure communications and comply with the rules needed to keep the government running in an emergency. He said Buttigieg was not subject to that requirement.
Johnson said Rubio would continue to use government planes and would reimburse the government for all personal travel. He added that Rubio would continue attending his son’s games during his final year of college football.
He said Rubio is “entirely unapologetic.”
