President Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, is the highest-paid employee in the entire federal government.
The nation’s leading infectious disease expert made $417,608 in 2019 and is projected to net approximately $2.5 million in salary from 2019 to 2024, according to Freedom of Information Act requests obtained by Forbes. Fauci, whose salary is funded by taxpayers, received a pay bump in 2014 when his paycheck increased from $335,000 to the current $417,608. Fauci raked in $3.6 million from 2010 to 2019.
The United States’s 4 million federal employees are usually subject to a pay cap, dubbed level IV, which is $172,500. However, Fauci and other doctors and scientists employed by the government are exempted from the cap to make their salaries more competitive to the private sector.
Fauci, who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1980, outearned former President Donald Trump ($400,000), former Vice President Mike Pence ($235,100), Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts ($270,700), and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ($223,500). Three other doctors, all from the Health and Human Services Department, earned more in federal salary than the president but fell short of Fauci’s pay.
The health authority appeared almost daily during the beginning stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump sparred with Fauci over the handling of the COVID-19 crisis and even retweeted a message to “#FireFauci” in April after the virus was spreading on U.S. soil.
Fauci, who now answers to Biden, reflected on his time with Trump and called the 45th president “the skunk at the picnic” who was “saying things that didn’t make any scientific sense.”
