In February, Sen. Dick Lugar and his wife took a $16,000 trip to Jordan.In April, Lugar and his son John took a $9,300 trip to Valencia, Spain.
In May, Lugar and his wife took a $10,000 trip to Croatia.
And in August, Lugar and his wife took a $6,500 trip to Banff, a tourist hot spot tucked in Canada's vast mountainous terrain.
Total cost to Lugar and his family for the travel, lodging and food: zero.
The travel costs for the Indiana Republican and his family members were picked up by the nonprofit Aspen Institute, a group synonymous on Capitol Hill with paying for travel and lodging for members of Congress to attend seminars on public policy issues.
Two years after Congress toughened ethics laws that prevent lobbyists and corporations from paying for members' trips, lawmakers are still seeing the world courtesy of other outside groups.
Although the trips are permissible because the money doesn't come directly from lobbyists or corporations, the walls can be very thin. Some of the nonprofit groups that sponsor member travel are themselves funded by corporate sponsors, and the conferences that members attend on the groups' dime often put them in direct contact with representatives of the corporate sponsors.
"While the new ethics rules broke the direct-sponsorship link, the concern remains that many of the same powerful interests are still involved through other means, namely as members and benefactors of the nonprofits sponsoring the trips," said Sheila Krumholz, head of the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors influence in government.
In 2009 alone, outside groups have spent more than $140,000 for a host of senators in both parties to visit locales around the world -- and they have spent hundreds of thousands more for senators' aides to attend conferences and meetings and make various on-site visits.
House members, too, have taken advantage of nonprofit travel; several of them participated in the Banff trip with Lugar, as did Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).
Members of Congress staunchly defend the practice, saying such trips help bring into focus deeply complex issues, allow them to interact with members from the opposite body or party with whom they rarely talk and expose them to experts in those areas to better understand public policy concerns.
Lugar, who is the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said trips sponsored by the Aspen Institute have been "remarkable educational experiences." "There are very few times that you have the opportunity to concentrate on a subject, whether it be energy or China or Latin America," Lugar told POLITICO. "But equally important is the fact that it's my best opportunity to actually meet members of the House of Representatives who may have an interest in subjects. ... You know who your allies are, or at least who has heard the same arguments, and have some opportunity then to progress with constructive bills or in conference to know really who is there."
Aides to Boxer and Harkin similarly defended the Banff trip, with Natalie Ravitz, a top Boxer aide, calling such Aspen trips "extremely" beneficial because they allow attendees to "study a specific issue from morning until night." Harkin spokeswoman Kate Cyrul said her boss -- who has traveled several times on the Aspen Institute's tab -- believed the Banff trip was "an opportunity to gather ideas on how to improve education standards for America's kids."
Bill Allison, an ethics law expert at the Sunlight Foundation, a group that promotes transparency in government, said the trips paid for by outside groups can "create the appearance of influence ... and the question is, is there an agenda behind these things?"
A few months before the Banff trip, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) each took a trip with his spouse to scenic Beaver Creek, Colo. (motto: "not exactly roughing it"), paid for by conservative think tank The American Enterprise Institute. The cost to AEI: $3,225 and $1,910, respectively. The conference featured business leaders, government officials and scholars discussing economic, social policy and security issues.