Business as usual among the guardians of the public purse

Rep. Thad McCotter (R-Mich.) has spent at least $30,000 in taxpayer-provided Republican Policy Committee funds to hire a consulting firm run by his chief of staff’s brother, Saul Anuzis, even as McCotter planned to kill the policy committee because it’s a “superfluous” waste of federal money.

The payments of $5,000 per month to Anuzis’s Michigan-based Coast to Coast Strategies, discovered by POLITICO in a review of RPC spending records, could roil a high stakes Republican leadership power struggle over the controversial proposal by McCotter, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, to eliminate the 61-year-old policy shop — a fight that carries larger implications for the House GOP’s balance of power.

Anuzis, a former Michigan Republican Party chairman who lost a 2009 bid to run the Republican National Committee, told POLITICO there is nothing improper about the arrangement.

“We basically did online-media and social-media work with [McCotter] to try to get the word out, the message out,” said Anuzis, who is often mentioned as a possible successor to RNC Chairman Michael Steele. “I was hired to do a job. We’ve done a job. ... We did what we were hired to do.”

His brother, Andy Anuzis, who is chief of staff in McCotter’s personal office and draws a portion of his salary from RPC funds, said, speaking on behalf of his boss, that Saul is a “national expert in the area of new media.”