Bernie Sanders burned over $550,000 on private jets while touring against 'oligarchy,' FEC filings reveal

Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped more than $550,000 in campaign funds on private jet travel in 2025—all while barnstorming the country with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on a tour they branded "Fighting Oligarchy."

The spending, revealed in a Fox News Digital review of Federal Election Commission filings, captures something essential about the modern progressive movement: the rules they demand for everyone else evaporate the moment those rules become inconvenient for them.

Sanders, the self-identified democratic socialist from Vermont, shelled out at least $354,000 to Ventura Jets alone, with additional payments flowing to N-Jet and Cirrus Aviation Services. The bulk of the expenditures landed in the first two quarters—precisely when Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez held the majority of their tour stops across the country.

The $15,000-an-Hour Socialist

In April, Fox News Digital obtained a photograph of Sanders boarding a Bombardier Challenger private jet at Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California. A source indicated that the New York congresswoman boarded the same aircraft. According to Ventura Air Services' website, the Bombardier Challenger runs up to $15,000 an hour.

When Fox News' Bret Baier pressed Sanders on the expenditure, the senator offered no contrition:

"You run a campaign, and you do three or four or five rallies in a week. [It is] the only way you can get around to talk to 30,000 people. You think I'm gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United … while 30,000 people are waiting?"

Sanders doubled down:

"That's the only way to get around. No apologies for that. That's what campaign travel is about. We've done it in the past. We're gonna do it in future."

He's right about one thing—he has done it in the past. His 2020 presidential campaign spent more than $1.9 million on private jets. The man who built a political brand on attacking millionaires and billionaires has now spent nearly $2.5 million flying like one.

Climate Warriors at 40,000 Feet

Sanders has been a vocal supporter of the Green New Deal. He has called climate change an "existential threat." He has spent decades lecturing Americans about carbon footprints, consumption, and the moral imperative of sacrifice.

A 2021 Transport and Environment report found that private jets are up to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes. Sanders knows this. His supporters know this. And yet the senator apparently believes that his political mission exempts him from the very standards he would impose on ordinary citizens.

This isn't hypocrisy discovered through opposition research or leaked documents. This is hypocrisy filed with federal regulators—in public, for anyone to see.

Ocasio-Cortez brings her own record to this partnership. In 2023, she offered this observation about corporate America:

"For real, how many private jets do these CEOs need? It is insatiable. It is unacceptable."

Insatiable. Unacceptable. Unless, apparently, you're a democratic socialist with a rally to attend.

The Boutique Hotel Socialist

The private jets weren't the only luxury the "Fighting Oligarchy" tour afforded its principals. According to AOC's campaign FEC filings, her operation spent campaign dollars at luxury and boutique hotels throughout the country—more than $53,000 on upscale accommodations in 2025 alone.

One filing shows her campaign paid $3,165.76 to The Leo Kent Hotel in Tucson around the time of a Fighting Oligarchy rally in that city. The spending stretched across multiple properties nationwide.

Fox News Digital asked representatives for both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez about the expenditures. Neither office responded in time for publication.

The Oligarchy They Won't Fight

Conservative political communications consultant Matt Gorman captured the absurdity plainly:

"You don't expect a socialist to fly commercial do you?"

He continued:

"There's no bigger hypocrite than the liberal who chastises us for eating meat and using gas stoves, yet flies in private jets."

The critique lands because it's earned. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have constructed entire political identities around the notion that wealth inequality represents an existential moral crisis—that the comfortable choices of the affluent come at the expense of working people and the planet itself.

They've demanded sacrifice from:

• Families who drive SUVs
• Workers in fossil fuel industries
• Small business owners facing regulatory burdens
• Homeowners who heat with natural gas

What they've never demanded is sacrifice from themselves.

The Pattern Beneath the Tour

This episode illuminates something deeper than personal hypocrisy—though the hypocrisy is brazen enough. It reveals the fundamental unseriousness of the progressive climate agenda.

When Sanders says flying private is "the only way to get around," he's making a utilitarian calculation: his time and his mission matter more than the carbon emissions he generates. His rallies justify his footprint. His importance grants him an exception.

This is precisely the logic progressives reject when it comes from anyone else. The factory owner who says regulations will cost jobs. The family that says they need a truck for work. The community that relies on energy production for its economy. In each case, the progressive response is the same: your convenience doesn't override the planet's survival.

Yet Sanders believes his convenience does.

The "Fighting Oligarchy" tour was designed to position Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez as tribunes of the working class—the authentic voices of Americans squeezed by corporate greed and concentrated wealth. They flew between rallies in aircraft that cost more per hour than many of their supporters earn in a month.

No Apologies, No Accountability

What makes Sanders' response so revealing is its defiance. He didn't claim ignorance. He didn't promise to do better. He didn't even offer the standard progressive penance of purchasing carbon offsets.

He said he'd do it again.

This is the confidence of a man who knows his base won't hold him accountable—who understands that progressive voters have so thoroughly absorbed the narrative of virtuous intentions that actual behavior becomes irrelevant. Sanders fights for the right things, therefore Sanders can do no wrong.

It's a permission structure that explains much of modern progressive politics: the climate envoy who jets to conferences, the housing advocate who blocks development in her neighborhood, the education reformer who sends his children to private school. The pattern repeats because the pattern is never punished.

What the Filings Really Show

Federal Election Commission disclosures exist for a reason. They allow citizens to see how political figures spend the money donated in their names. They create accountability—or at least the possibility of it.

Sanders' filings show a man who has spent decades building a movement around economic justice and environmental urgency, then spent more than half a million dollars in a single year flying in the manner of the oligarchs he claims to oppose.

The voters who donated to his campaign—many of them working-class Americans who believed in his message—funded those flights. They paid for the Bombardier Challenger. They covered the $15,000 hours.

Sanders offered them no apology. Just a lecture about how waiting in line at United was beneath him.

The "Fighting Oligarchy" tour revealed exactly one oligarch. He was on the plane.