By Al Kamen, The Washington Post, March 24, 2007

25 Mar 2007 // Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small's "Dom Perignon" lifestyle, as one senator put it, complete with $2 million in housing and office expenses over the past six years, may have seemed a bit much to some folks on the Hill.

But the Smithsonian Board of Regents deemed them, and apparently the $915,000 he will take home this year, to be authorized and "reasonable" under the terms of his employment agreement.

And the fact is, Small went to great lengths to justify and explain each and every one of those supposedly lavish expenses. The explanations are compelling, and provide tips you can use if you're on government travel and need to figure out how to justify using a limo service rather than taking cabs or -- heaven forbid -- driving yourself around in a rental car.

On one trip to the San Francisco area a few years back, Small had to take a limo, an aide's memo explained, because "the meetings were scheduled immediately upon arrival at the airport and back-to-back. There was no time to spend renting a car or risk getting lost en route" to various sites.

Even more important, "he had luggage that he could not store anywhere so it was most convenient for the same car to hold his luggage until his meetings ended." Also, there was a "dinner meeting" and it was "impossible to guarantee that a taxi would drive him from Palo Alto . . . to San Jose . . . so late in the evening." (Word is they have dinner real late out there but taxi drivers go to sleep early.)

The best justification is that "there would have also been a safety risk for him to have to carry as much cash as would have been needed to pay a taxi to drive him from city to city."

Regulations require him to carry a sign: "Caution: This Man Carries Thousands in Small Bills."