Chris Christie May Be Out, But He Still Has a Taxpayer-Funded Staffer and Office

Chris Christie left the governor's office nearly four months ago. He's working as a paid contributor to ABC News and acting as an unofficial adviser to President Trump. But he's still costing New Jersey taxpayers money.

That's because the current year's state budget has a $250,000 line item entitled "Gubernatorial Transition - Governor." The money pays for a staffer earning $65,000, rented office space near Christie's home in Morris County and an official portrait that cost $85,000 (the highest price ever paid for a New Jersey gubernatorial painting, according to The Bergen Record).

And that doesn't include the costs for a state police security detail and driver, which Christie is still afforded for travel in the state. Christie's lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, also used a driver for her first three months out of office to attend state events. 

It is unclear what Christie and his aide, Pete Sheridan, are doing in their office. Before his current gig Sheridan was executive director of the New Jersey Republican party, and prior to that he worked on both of Christie's gubernatorial campaigns and in the intergovernmental affairs unit of the governor's office, which was disbanded after an employee there was implicated in the Bridgegate scandal. 

In an email, Sheridan wrote: "Governor Christie is running his transition office in accordance with past practices. He is acting within the $250,000 budget approved by the Legislature in the Fiscal Year 2018 budget, a budget which is consistent with that provided to his predecessors to include his six month transition, office space, staff and his official portrait."

All of Christie's recent predecessors of both parties were indeed afforded the same perks. In fact, a review of previous budgets by WNYC indicates that if Christie spends his allotment, New Jersey taxpayers will have paid about $1 million over the last 17 years for governors who were not actually governing. The biggest spender was Donald DiFrancesco, who was acting governor for less than a year but still spent $258,000 on his transition out of office, according to the fiscal 2002 budget. That's far more than his salary while in office.

New Jersey may be an outlier in paying for such transitions out of office. A spokesman for former New York Gov. David Paterson said he didn't receive a stipend, driver or security after he left office. The spokesman, Sean Darcy, said Patterson quipped that state officials just "called him a taxi."

The current New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, received the same $250,000 for his transition into office, which involved meetings around the state, the preparation of policy briefs and job interviews. Clearly outgoing governors have less work to do, but a source explained that they have to respond to correspondence and invitations to events in the weeks and months after their terms expire.