U.S. government agencies have ordered half as many official photos of President Donald Trump and Vice President Michael Pence than they did under former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
When Obama and Biden took office, the Government Printing Office announced it would print more than 130,000 photos to be hung in more than 7,000 federal installations managed by the General Services Administration (GSA), military installations, and other federal facilities.
However, on November 28, the GPO announced it would print more than 65,000 photos, to be hung in 1,600 such federal facilities.
Asked about the enormous discrepancy, the GPO spokesman Gary Somerset responded: “GPO produces what agencies order.”
He referred Breitbart News to the GSA to find out why 5,400 fewer federal offices would display the president and vice president’s photos. Breitbart News contacted the GSA, but did not hear back by deadline.
Until this week, the GSA had been led by a career civil servant Timothy Horne, who started working with GSA in 1993.
On Tuesday, Emily W. Murphy was sworn in as administrator.
It was also not until this week that the State Department announced to staff it had received the official photos of Trump and Pence from the GPO, to be distributed to its offices and embassies worldwide.
Update: After deadline, GSA reached out to Breitbart News and indicated the discrepancy is not with them. A spokeswoman for the agency said GSA only covers a fraction of the photo orders. She said they ordered about the same number of photos in 2009 and 2017 — 7,295 in 2009 and 5,541 in 2017, with fewer photos ordered in 2017 due to better estimates.
It is not clear which agencies are responsible for the discrepancies.
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