Mike Rounds Corruption & Ethics South Dakota

Mike Rounds Spent More Taxpayer Money on Travel Than Any Other Senator — $625,000 of It on Private Charters, Mostly From a Company Whose Owner Gave Him $4,000

Between October 2024 and March 2026, Mike Rounds' office spent more on travel than any other Senate office, including more than $625,000 on charter planes. Each charter leg to Minneapolis ran about $6,000; a round-trip commercial ticket from Pierre to Washington often costs $500 to $1,000.

MAGA Report Cards · Sep 28, 2026

Senators fly home on the taxpayers' dime all the time. That's part of the job. But one senator's office has spent more on it than anyone else in the Senate — and a big share of it went to private planes.

Mike Rounds, South Dakota's Republican senator, has spent more taxpayer money on travel than any other senator's office since the fall of 2024, Axios reported on September 26. More than $625,000 of it went to private charter companies.

That's from Senate office spending records covering October 1, 2024 through March 31, 2026, in an analysis that a group opposing Rounds gave to Axios. The analysis is built on public disclosures.

Nobody else is close

Rounds didn't edge out the next senator on charter flights. He lapped the field.

According to Axios, he spent more than $400,000 more on charters than the second-highest spender, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Senate Majority Leader John Thune — who represents the exact same state as Rounds — spent about $70,000 on charters over the same stretch. Rounds spent roughly nine times that.

This isn't new, either. The Center Square looked at the Senate's expense reports back in March and found that in 2024 alone, Rounds spent about $480,000 on charter flights. That was nearly half of what all 100 senators spent on charters put together.

$6,000 a leg, when a ticket costs $500

Here's the trip, as The Center Square described it. On Mondays, Rounds typically took a charter plane from Pierre, in the middle of South Dakota, to a suburb of Minneapolis. There, he switched to a regular commercial flight to Washington.

Each charter leg to the Minneapolis area cost about $6,000. The Center Square found that round-trip commercial flights from Pierre to Washington often cost between $500 and $1,000, and that some take as little as about six hours. Rounds often spent $10,000 to $15,000 a week on the travel.

His office told Axios there had been no flights out of Pierre that worked with the Senate schedule "until recently," that the Senate Rules Committee approved the charters, and that he now flies commercial through Denver after new service from Pierre began last year. "Anyone who lives in rural South Dakota knows how challenging air travel can be," a spokesperson said.

That's true. It's also true that most people in rural South Dakota make that trip without a $6,000 private plane — and that South Dakota's other senator, flying out of the same state, spent a fraction as much.

The charter company's owner is a Rounds donor

Most of Rounds' charter flights came from Mustang Aviation, according to The Center Square. Its owner is Jim Peitz.

Federal Election Commission records show Peitz gave Rounds' campaign $4,000 over the 2020 election cycle — $1,000 in November 2017, $1,500 in November 2018, and $1,500 in November 2019. Those filings list his employer as Capital City Air. His later political donations list Mustang Aviation.

So the senator who spent the most on private planes was sending much of that public money to a company run by someone who helped pay for his campaign.

Cutting everything but the plane

Rounds has not been this generous with other people's programs.

In 2025, he voted for the $9 billion package of DOGE cuts — the bill that clawed back money Congress had already approved for public broadcasting and foreign aid. That included the federal money that keeps tribal radio stations on the air across South Dakota's reservations. Rounds settled for a handshake promise from Trump's budget director to send those stations $9.4 million, a promise that was never written into the law.

He isn't the only Republican with a taste for private planes. Pennsylvania's Rob Bresnahan, who sells himself as an everyman, took a $23,000 private flight — though his campaign says he paid for that one himself.

What the record shows

From October 2024 through March 2026, Mike Rounds' Senate office spent more on travel than any other Senate office, including more than $625,000 on private charter planes — over $400,000 more than the next senator, and roughly nine times what South Dakota's other senator, John Thune, spent on charters. In 2024 alone, Rounds accounted for nearly half of all Senate charter spending, paying about $6,000 a leg to fly from Pierre to Minneapolis when round-trip commercial tickets to Washington often cost $500 to $1,000. Most of those charters came from Mustang Aviation, whose owner gave Rounds' campaign $4,000.