Taxpayers Pay $500 Million a Year for Obama's PR Staffers

President Barack Obama has hired hundreds of public relations specialists during his time in office at the cost of a half-billion dollars a year, The Washington Times reports.

The newspaper sites a report by the Government Accountability Office which reveals the Obama administration added 667 public-relations staffers from 2008 to 2011, an increase of 15 percent.

The number has since decreased, but there were still about 5,100 PR pros on the payroll in 2014, the last year the GAO had figures on, The Times says.

Not included in the half-billion dollars figure is more than $100 million spent for private-sector press experts or $800 million for advertising in 2015.

"Spending $1.5 billion on government PR activities is a huge waste of money," Chris Edwards, a federal budget scholar at the Cato Institute, told The Times. "That sort of spending should be drastically scaled back."

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