Dr. Anthony Fauci is the king of the federal payroll, according to a new report.
The report in Forbes, which used data from OpentheBooks.com, says Fauci earned $417,608 in 2019, the last year for which salary data was available.
Forbes reported that OpentheBooks.com used Freedom of Information Act requests to get the data.
According to the data, which only tracked those whose salaries are paid out of taxpayer dollars, Fauci earned more than anyone else among the 1,368,474 executive branch employees whose salaries were listed and in fact more than anyone else in the federal government.
When Forbes did the math, it projected that Fauci will earn $25 million through 2024 should he stay in his current position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Fauci made $335,000 in 2014, according to the data, meaning his salary increased 24.7 percent over five years. That’s well above the rate of inflation, which was roughly 8 percent over those years.
A 2018 report by FederalPay.org showed that at that time, Fauci earned 204 percent of the average salary of a medical officer hired by the federal government
Fauci out-earns those who use his advice to set policy.
The president’s salary is $400,000 a year — which former President Donald Trump donated. In 2019, Vice President Mike Pence was earning $235,100.
Fauci made a comment about his income in an Aug. 13 interview with actor Matthew McConaughey, in which he responded to a question about investments in potential coronavirus vaccines, by saying “Matthew, no, I got zero! I am a government worker. I have a government salary.”
Fauci, 80, began working for the NIH in 1968.
The doctor emerged from behind the scenes last year to become the federal face of the effort to control the coronavirus.
He has said recently that normal life could return to America this year, but not to bet on it.
He said last week that if most Americans are vaccinated against the coronavirus, “by the time we get to the fall, we will be approaching a degree of normality. It’s not going to be perfectly normal, but one that I think will take a lot of pressure off the American public,” according to The New York Times.
Fauci’s advice has not always been well-received.
For example, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has often pushed back against Fauci’s support for lockdowns, invoked Fauci’s name when expressing his own belief that Americans can discard their masks once they have been vaccinated against COVID-19 or were infected.
“If you’ve had the disease or you’ve been vaccinated and you’re several weeks out of your second dose, throw your mask away and tell Dr. Fauci to take a leap because, once you have immunity, you don’t need to do this,” Paul said, according to the Louisville Courier Journal.
