OK, it's small potatoes compared to John Thain's legendary $1.2 million redecoration of his Merill Lynch office suite. But still: in these cash-strapped times, we're wondering how RNC members feel about Michael Steele's decision to spend $18,500 on his own quarters.

Check out this nugget, from a Politico story about rancor between Steele and the committee members:

The committee's financial reports show that last month it paid nearly $22,000 to a Washington, D.C. interior decorator, though RNC spokesman Todd Irons said only $18,500 of that was for "improvements to the chairman's office."

Actually, though, we might have seen this coming. In that disastrous GQ interview from March, Steele mentioned that he was "re-doing" the heavy dark-wood Republican furniture he inherited. "This is gonna sound weird, but it's way too male for me," he said.

We called the interior decorator listed in the financial reports, to find out whether he had been asked to make Steele's office more feminine. But he declined to talk about his work for the RNC.

An RNC spokesperson told Politico that the committee still has not hired a press secretary, a research director, or several other positions.