Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission under former President Joe Biden and one of the administration’s most far-left members, billed taxpayers for a luxury car service while barnstorming the country on the eve of the presidential election, according to a inspector general probe.
As part of a “Charge Card Act review,” the FTC’s inspector general found “unusually high expenses for travel,” including nearly $19,000 for booking a private car service during 16 trips to other cities, plus additional costs for using the service to get around Washington, D.C. It found that Khan had used the service for “ease of transportation,” without addressing “a less expensive alternative.” On one trip to Denver, Khan spent $1,128 on a private chauffeur service when she could have rented a car for $407, it said.
Some of the expenses billed to taxpayers may have come as she was accused of using her government position to campaign for Democrats ahead of the November 2024 election.
On October 2, 2024, Punchbowl News said Khan was “zig-zagging” the country to appear with Democrat politicians, where “Khan’s events with lawmakers have nominal policy themes…but the timing so near the election is hard to ignore.” That included an event in Chicago with Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi and in Wisconsin with Rep. Mark Pocan. The car service fees highlighted by the inspector general include October 2 travel in Chicago at $1,021, and October 3 travel in Madison, Wisconsin, for $2,215.
The findings come as Khan, who has consistently attacked the greed of large corporations and CEOs, has prominently boosted the campaign of socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York.
FTC management replied to the inspector general that the spending did not violate existing rules, but highlighted a need to update the agency’s policies. The inspector general recommended “enhanced requirements for the justification and documentation of these travel expenses.”
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) faulted the politically tinged trips even before the luxury car service was known about, saying Khan had a pattern of playing fast and loose with rules. He wrote in October 2024 that “Federal law and FTC ethics rules prohibit you from participating in political events, and from using appropriated funds for any political activity… This concern is particularly significant given your history of ignoring agency ethics advice concerning the appearance of partiality, including ignoring the advice of the agency’s Designated Agency Ethics Official.”
Khan faces additional questions after she placed a Democrat political appointee into a top long-term job at the FTC in the final hours of the Biden administration, essentially infiltrating the incoming Trump administration. Nathaniel Segal worked as Special Assistant to President Joe Biden and Deputy Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris until January 18, 2025, when he was placed in a non-political FTC job after Khan personally overrode staff’s concerns, three Trump officials previously told The Daily Wire.
As someone who had just started his job at the FTC, Segal should have been on new-employee probationary status. But he was falsely put on the FTC’s payroll as a non-probationary employee, making it harder for Trump administration officials to fire him. When the Trump administration fixed the error, which would have made Segal worry that he would be laid off, he created false, backdated paperwork to try to get paid through Elon Musk’s “Fork in the Road” buyout offer, for which he was not eligible and had not actually applied, according to the officials.
The Segal situation is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors, and it could implicate not just Segal, but also Khan.
Since The Daily Wire broke that story, it has uncovered more questions about Segal’s hiring, finding no record that the FTC ever advertised the job to the public (most openings are required to be advertised on USAJobs.gov). That would mean that Khan gave a civil service job to a Democrat insider without giving the public any chance to apply.
Converting political appointees to career employees at the tail end of an administration is known as “burrowing” and is only permitted with permission from the Office of Personnel Management, which said it had no record of approving the move.
Some Biden administration officials schemed to evade those regulations by creating “three-year term” positions that would implant a Democrat operative through the bulk of the Trump administration, but which they argued didn’t count as burrowing because the job wasn’t permanent. But such positions also need to be advertised to the public, and wouldn’t be eligible for the buyout, which was designed to get rid of employees who could otherwise be on the payroll for decades.
Khan’s possible abuse of the civil service for partisan purposes is particularly egregious as Democrats claim it is a conspiracy theory for conservatives to believe in a “deep state.”
Although no job postings appear to show the FTC giving others the change to apply to the Deputy Technology Officer job that went to Segal, they do show a frenzy of attempted hiring activity in the FTC’s tech and information departments between the election and inauguration. Those include:
- A cyber adviser at up to $191,900, posted December 21
- An IT specialist at up to $88,926 posted December 23
- A “Supervisory Information Technology Specialist (Mission Success Manager)” at up to $195,200 posted January 15
Khan, now on the faculty of Columbia University, did not return a request for comment.
