Oh, I’m certain she used the $15,000-per government kind for that (for budget play).
That is a tiresome meme . . . $500 ash trays for military planes.The trouble with that meme is that - certainly in the case of the ash tray - the problem is not that the tray cost too much, but that the contractor is losing money on it.
You could easily pay that kind of money for an ash tray for a Ferrari or such. For government work, bureaucratic rules guarantee that you can’t make money charging $500 for an item you had to design and get past the paperwork burden, and then only make a dozen or so items.
My brother told of a case where he explained to his boss how to solve a problem by simply using a scale model of the aircraft with which an issue had arisen. In preparation for a trip to Washington to see his boss, the guy went out to a hobby shop and bought the model, paying for it out of pocket. He could certainly have bought it through government channels and saved himself the money - but the paperwork would have delayed the project by months, and cost the government far more than the price of the item.
But if he had gone that route, there would be a paper trail proving that the government had not been cheated. </irony>