Another public-private partnership in the making

...Oklahoma [Senator Tom Coburn] said Tuesday on that the cost of flying the undocumented, unaccompanied children home on first-class seats would only cost $8 million — but the next day, he revised his estimate to “less than $20 million.”“For less than $20 million we can fly them all back first class,” he said on CNN Wednesday afternoon. He made a nearly identical comment on CNN’s “Crossfire” Tuesday night, but substituted $8 million for $20 million for the total cost of the first-class tickets. 

He did not elaborate on how he came to either estimate. 

Coburn’s office did not respond to several requests for comment. 

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) also jumped on the idea of flying the children home Wednesday morning in a CNN interview — but with a different cost estimate than the one Coburn offered. 

“I went online earlier,” Johnson said on CNN. “There are airfares as low as $207 to return these children in a humane fashion.” 

Johnson looked up five separate airfares as options for getting the unaccompanied children back to their countries of origin, he told POLITICO on Wednesday afternoon. He averaged the costs to a fare of $250 a child and found that the total cost of flying the children home — though not first class — came to $14 million.