(DCNF)—Former White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci earned $3.5 million in his first year of retirement from government and may have misled Congress about the date of his departure, documents reveal.
Fauci received several six-figure deposits through 2023 totaling $1.15 million according to a 141-page financial disclosure obtained by Open The Books, a government watchdog group.
The documents do not describe the source of the deposits.
Fauci leveraged his celebrity status as the top trusted messenger on COVID-19 to pad his earnings in 2023, just as newly empowered Congressional investigators sharpened their focus on the ways Fauci betrayed the public’s trust at the pandemic’s height.
Fauci sold his memoir to a subsidiary of Penguin Random House for a reported $5 million in March 2023. That news coincided with a March 2023 congressional memo showing Fauci had privately “prompted” an influential paper dismissing the theory that COVID could have resulted from a lab accident. On July 1, 2023, Fauci began an appointment at Georgetown University as distinguished university professor in both the School of Medicine and School of Public Policy. Roughly two weeks later, two of the coauthors of that paper testified to Congress about the extent of their collaboration with Fauci.
The White House on Friday updated the official covid.gov page to highlight this paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” and Fauci’s behind-the-scenes role in downplaying the “lab leak theory.”
Fauci also accepted speaking gigs with several special interest groups in 2023. Some of these organizations and trade associations — including the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) — have policy agendas that intersect with the federal government’s COVID-19 response or the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the NIH division that Fauci led for nearly four decades.
Fauci’s esteem in the scientific community was lucrative in 2023, despite nagging questions from Congress about his endorsement of gain-of-function research like the coronavirus experiments funded by NIAID in Wuhan, China.
Fauci accepted medals with monetary prizes from the highest echelons of academia including Columbia University’s Calderone Prize, worth $50,000, and the National Academy of Medicine’s Lienhard Prize, worth $40,000.
Fauci’s final government salary totaled an unprecedented $480,654, the highest salary earned by any of the roughly 2.4 million employees who work for the federal government, including the president, according to Open The Books. Fauci continues to accept a six-figure pension.
Fauci’s net worth roughly doubled from $7.6 million the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2019 to $15 million in 2023. Fauci also received taxpayer-funded transportation and security detail via the U.S. Marshals Service as a private citizen in 2023.
“Dr. Fauci’s assets soared during the worst of the draconian Covid lockdowns while families and small businesses struggled through school closures and lost income. Now it’s clear the cash kept coming during his first year of ‘retirement,’” said Open The Books CEO John Hart. “He was rubbing elbows with groups like AHIP flanked by taxpayer-funded security — even as his wife remained the top bioethicist at NIH.”
Amid concerns Fauci misled Congress under oath about the research in Wuhan, former President Joe Biden granted Fauci a pardon on Jan. 20.
Fauci did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Delayed Retirement
Fauci announced in August 2022 that he would retire in December 2022. At the time, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer of Kentucky warned that “retirement can’t shield Dr. Fauci from congressional oversight.”
In November 2022, Congressional Republicans — who had been investigating connections between Fauci’s NIAID and the Wuhan Institute of Virology — won control of the House of Representatives and thus key committees.
Now, Open The Books has uncovered evidence through Fauci’s Application for Immediate Retirement that he delayed his retirement until Jan. 6, 2023 — three days after the new Congress started — but misinformed Congress about the change.
Fauci sent a request to NIH Acting Director Larry Tabak to delay his retirement in order to retain personal protection, emails suggest.
An email from Tabak to Fauci indicates a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Marshals Service was still tied up in the Office of General Counsel.
“OGC is working to clear the MOU from the USMS,” Tabak said in a Dec. 27, 2022, email to Fauci confirming his delayed retirement date.
In both a transcribed interview with congressional investigators in January 2024 and in public congressional testimony under oath in June 2024, Fauci described his retirement from federal service as having occurred in December 2022.
Fauci’s extraordinary MOU with the U.S. Marshals Service cost taxpayers roughly $15 million, Open The Books and journalist Jordan Schachtel reported in November 2024.
The U.S. Marshals Service captures fugitives and protects judges and court witnesses. It’s not clear that any other former federal employee has been protected under such an agreement, according to Open The Books.
President Donald Trump terminated the arrangement on Jan. 23, along with the security details of former national security adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“They all made a lot of money. They can hire their own security too,” Trump said. “Fauci made a lot of money.”
Bioethics?
Some of the growth in the Fauci household’s net worth stems from the taxpayer-funded salary of Dr. Christine Grady, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, who earned $263,005 in 2024.
An NIH official told the DCNF earlier this month that although Grady had a good reputation within the bioethics discipline, she had a conflict of interest that posed ethical questions of its own.
“One of the problems when the coverup was going on of the Wuhan lab leak, that whole fiasco, was that they were not listening to anyone giving ethics advice,” the official said. “If they had had someone at the table with knowledge of this, they would have said: ‘Hey do you want to play it this way, or be more transparent?’ Someone could have raised the question.”
“That’s something Christine Grady could have, or should have, done,” the official continued. “She wasn’t able to do it because she was Fauci’s wife.”
“Maybe they had discussions in private about what was going on,” the official said. “She was placed in a conflicted role because of that.”
Grady was among the employees at the Department of Health and Human Services affected by the department-wide restructuring and reduction in force prompted by the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this month. Grady was reportedly given a choice between relocating away from the couple’s tony Beltway neighborhood to an Indian Health Service post or leaving HHS.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.