Government salaries vary an awful lot; from $100 a year to $11.5 million. So who makes what?
Today we divide the issue of taxpayer-funded salaries in two. How much officials make, and then how much they really make. Why do so many politicians make money once they leave office? How much can you get from speaking at events? And how do lobbyists affect not only policy, but their career trajectory?
Our guest is Anna Massoglia from Open Secrets, the "nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics."
Transcript
Nick Capodice: Hannah you've ever played the game Life
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, yeah. That game makes me kind of nervous for some reason.
Nick Capodice: If anyone out there hasn't played Life, it is kind of a game where you spin a little wheel and you move your car around. You go to college, make money, inherit your aunt's skunk farm and have babies.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, that's I would say that's a pretty decent summary. Uh, you know, it's kind of a bleak game when you think about it. It's basically [00:00:30] make as much money as you can and you win at life.
Nick Capodice: Do you remember what the best paying jobs were in life?
Hannah McCarthy: I think so I actually played a few years ago, so I know that they have updated the game. I'm pretty sure it was doctor and lawyer.
Nick Capodice: Yep those were the top earners for me too. And I bring it up, Hannah, because you'll notice that president, member of Congress, Chief justice, those weren't options in the game of Life.
Hannah McCarthy: They sure weren't, Nick.
Nick Capodice: They weren't.
Hannah McCarthy: I [00:01:00] know it changes every few years, but how much money do those people make in the real world?
Nick Capodice: Well, this is a big old hairy Gordian knot, Hannah. So I'm gonna cut it in two. You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah Mccarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today we're talking about how much money government employees make. And, yeah, I'm going to do a part A and a part B. Part A is going to be me pretty much rattling off salaries of various government officials. And part B [00:01:30] is where we'll talk about how much they really make, as in money outside of their law determined salary.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, let's do it. All right. So let's just get right down to it. Who is the highest paid government employee?
Nick Capodice: State or federal.
Hannah McCarthy: Let's do federal. Is it the president? Because it kind of feels like it maybe should be the president.
Nick Capodice: It's not the president, but we will start there. Article two, section one says that Congress determines the salary of the president and that it cannot be increased [00:02:00] or decreased during their terms. And right now, that salary is where it's been since 2001, $400,000 a year.
Hannah McCarthy: I mean, that's pretty good. Like, I, I would love that, frankly. Um, how much were our earlier presidents paid?
Nick Capodice: Interestingly, George Washington tried to refuse payment for serving as president, but Congress was like, let's pull out the old contract, George. I think that's our decision. And they made him take 25,000 bucks. And [00:02:30] I know there's no accurate way to say what that means in today's dollars. It's like a pet bugaboo of historians. But I will say, if you just punch it into an inflation calculator, it comes out to $729,000. Whew. But you should also know Washington didn't need it. He was a very wealthy landowner and slaver, distiller. That salary was a drop in the bucket. By the way, Hannah, do you know the story about Babe Ruth and Herbert Hoover?
Hannah McCarthy: Actually, I don't.
Nick Capodice: In [00:03:00] 1929, Babe Ruth made $80,000, and a reporter asked him why he made more than President Hoover, who made 75,000. And the Babe said, well, I had a better year than he did.
Hannah McCarthy: In 1929 was not a great year for Hoover. That is true. Yeah.
Nick Capodice: Stock market crash and the Great Depression, all that stuff.
Hannah McCarthy: Uh, but back to my question. Who does have the highest salary in the federal government?
Nick Capodice: Well, as these jobs change over the years, the salary changes. So I'm going to tell you, the record holder, [00:03:30] the record holder for federal government salary is none other than former head of the National Institutes of Health, doctor Anthony Fauci.
Hannah McCarthy: Really? How much?
Nick Capodice: Before he left his position, he was paid $434,000 a year, and he now receives a yearly pension of $350,000. And he's not alone. If you look at the top 100 paid federal employees right now, the NIH holds the first four slots and then the other 96 are medical officers in [00:04:00] the Veterans Health Administration.
Hannah McCarthy: Well, that makes sense. They're doctors. I mean, they're called medical officers, but they did go to medical school.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. And doctors in the private sector have a massive range of salaries, depending on their specialties and myriad other factors. But government employee doctors might have to give up on those jobs in the private sector, which are far more lucrative, and their salaries are not a matter of public record. But back to the list. Once we get past all the medical government positions, we [00:04:30] get to members of Congress.
Hannah McCarthy: And members of Congress decide how much they will make right. And I know they can't raise or lower their own salaries until an election of representatives has happened, because that's what it says in the 27th amendment.
Nick Capodice: Very good, Hannah. So let's jump into a breakdown of modern day congressional pay. All members of Congress, I'm talking senators and representatives make $174,000 a year. Now, there are a few notable bonuses. The vice president, who, [00:05:00] lest we forget, is the president of the Senate, makes $255,800. President pro tempore of the Senate, which is the longest serving member of the Senate of the party in power. They make $193,400, as do the Senate majority and minority leaders and the House majority and minority leaders. The last exception is the speaker of the House, the People's Chamber. They make $223,500 a year.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. And last federal employee that we really should cover, [00:05:30] Nick and I ask because it was in the news recently Supreme court justices.
Archival: A new ProPublica report says Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas privately pushed for a higher salary and to let justices take speaking fees.
Nick Capodice: The New York Times and ProPublica reported a memo from 2000 where Justice Clarence Thomas threatened to resign if the Scotus salary was not increased, and it has increased quite a bit since then. Thomas was making 173,000. [00:06:00] The year in 2000, and now he and all the other associate justices make $285,400 a year. And don't forget the chief. Chief Justice Roberts makes a little more 298,500.
Hannah McCarthy: And I'm going to imagine our listeners have had just about enough of the numbers by now. But I do want to touch on the States.
Nick Capodice: All right. Pop quiz hotshot. Who are the highest paid state employees?
Hannah McCarthy: I actually [00:06:30] know this. Public university football coaches.
Nick Capodice: Mccarthy makes the point.
Nick Capodice: Is that what they say, like the point is good.
Hannah McCarthy: You..you've never seen football, have you?
Nick Capodice: I did play a lot of Madden at one strange point in my life.
Nick as John Madden: He was looking to go over there and he ran right into those coverage guys.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, let's have those numbers.
Nick Capodice: In 40 out of the 50 states. Yes. Public university football coaches are far and away the highest paid government [00:07:00] employees. Now, the reason they are government employees is because public universities receive state funds, which can contribute to the coach's salary. But the reason they're so high is that there are many other sources for their salaries outside of the government, and as a result, they make a lot more than the president, many, many times more. The highest paid Hanna is William Dabo Swinney. He's the coach at Clemson in South Carolina. His current salary is $11.5 million [00:07:30] a year. Yep. And you're not going to see a salary anywhere near that in any state for non-sporting related jobs. You know, you've got some medical officials and state college presidents and professors who make around 500 K, but that is pretty rare.
Hannah McCarthy: And what about state legislatures? I know that those salaries vary a lot.
Nick Capodice: They sure do. California's state reps make the most at $110,000 a year. And I don't need to tell you, Hannah, which state's representatives make the least, now do [00:08:00] I?
Hannah McCarthy: No, you do not. That would be New Hampshire, the Granite State. Live free or die. Here in New Hampshire, we pay our state reps 100 bucks a year. But to be fair, there are 400 of them. All right, Nick, I think we got most of it, right.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, we got most of the utterly irrelevant stuff out of the way. Because when it comes to politicians, the salary is just the tip of the iceberg. And I've got someone from the most informed organization on this topic in the country. But first we got to take a quick [00:08:30] break.
Hannah McCarthy: But before the break, we are in the midst of our podcast fundraiser and we have a hat and we have socks. Very, very fine. NHPR Merino wool socks made in New Hampshire. Warm toes might not be a right protected by an amendment, but maybe it should be. Nick wrote this. You can get the hat and the socks by making a $10 a month gift right now at civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy: We're [00:09:00] back. We're talking about money and politics. How and how much. And, Nick, we were about to get into the real money.
Nick Capodice: The real money indeed. Hannah. And here is someone who knows where all that money comes from.
Anna Massoglia: My name is Anna Massoglia, I'm the editorial and investigations manager at Open Secrets.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, Open secrets. We use them all the time when we research episodes, so we should probably tell everyone what they do.
Anna Massoglia: So Open secrets is a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks money in politics in the United States. We look at things like lobbying, campaign [00:09:30] finances at the state, as well as the federal level. We have both a research and journalism arm, so we do some of our own reporting, but primarily we exist to provide research to provide nonpartisan, completely unbiased data to journalists, to academics, to students, to the average person who wants to contact us and better understand who their representative is, who's funding them, or anything else about money in politics.
Nick Capodice: So any money somebody makes while they're in office has to be reported. You're not allowed to make what's called outside earned income [00:10:00] over 15% of your salary. So that's about $27,000.
Hannah McCarthy: Earned income.
Nick Capodice: Earned income. You heard the magic word.
Hannah McCarthy: So is there an income that counts as unearned?
Nick Capodice: There is; bonds, investments, stocks, rent. And if you're married, lots of that income can be generated from your spouse.
Hannah McCarthy: I mean, politicians cannot take money directly into their bank account from lobbyists, but they can receive contributions to their campaigns, right?
Nick Capodice: They can. And the cap is $6,600 [00:10:30] per individual, and then sometimes another 6600 for that individual and their family. And that may sound like small potatoes, but all those individual gifts add up. Uh, former speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. His 2024 campaign made $886,000 from lobbyists and their families alone.
Hannah McCarthy: We should also mention here it does take a lot of money to run for the House of Representatives, and it's never over. The second [00:11:00] you start the job, you're campaigning for the next election.
Nick Capodice: Constantly, constantly campaigning. But Anna told me it's not just how much people make while they're in office or towards their campaign, it's what they make after.
Anna Massoglia: There's a number of different avenues for members of Congress to make money, both while they are in office, and those opportunities multiply after they are able to leave that service as well. So during that time in office, oftentimes you'll see things like book deals show up in their personal financial disclosures, [00:11:30] which are legally required to be disclosed every year. Um, once members of Congress may leave after that, they're much more open to not just these things like book deals, but also speaking fees.
Nick Capodice: Speaking fees are huge, and these happen before or after your time in office. You can't do it while you're in office. Uh, just to use some people who are currently running for President Joe Biden, uh, Joe Biden, when he was out of office, made about $200,000 for speaking at events, Nikki Haley, also [00:12:00] $200,000 per event. And Mike Pence, who, yes, is no longer running, 100,000.
Hannah McCarthy: So you're saying the day you leave office, you can start to rake in the big bucks?
Nick Capodice: Not like that day. You have to wait a little bit.
Anna Massoglia: After what's called a cooling off period. So the period right after they leave the government where they are subject to additional restrictions on things like lobbying, uh, after that period is open, there are even more opportunities to make money as a revolving door lobbyist, being able to go back and even push and advocate for policies with their old colleagues. [00:12:30]
Hannah McCarthy: What does Anna mean by revolving door lobbyist.
Anna Massoglia: The revolving door is when a government official, such as a member of Congress, a congressional staffer, or someone working in a different government agency, or even the president can leave office and go into a private sector position. This could be a variety of things, whether it's a consultancy for a business or explicitly registering as a lobbyist. And in that position in particular as a lobbyist. This former government official now has gone through a revolving [00:13:00] door. The revolving door government official will then be able to go back to former colleagues to, uh, in some cases, even their subordinates, and lobby them down the road and sometimes on the same issues they may have worked on while they were in government positions.
Hannah McCarthy: So the quote unquote, revolving door is a metaphor for returning to government and using their influence as a former elected official and their understanding of how the system works for personal gain. Right. Um, okay. So I want to know how much money [00:13:30] a former member of Congress can make working as a lobbyist versus how much they made as a congressperson.
Anna Massoglia: So after members leave Congress, they don't really have to file the same personal financial disclosures. So we don't necessarily know how much they're making down the road. Uh, but just looking at average salaries for firms, looking at average, even for non-former members of Congress, you're seeing jumps to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in some cases.
Hannah McCarthy: Hundreds of thousands of dollars a [00:14:00] month.
Nick Capodice: Yep. We're in state football coach territory.
Anna Massoglia: And the thing about the revolving door is, of course, it can spin. Many times you may see them after going to that private sector position, going back to a government position and kind of bouncing back and forth. And the more you see them bouncing back and forth, you kind of start to see these trends of, oh, these are the issues that matter to them both in and out of government, which really builds this portfolio, which makes them all the more marketable to different special interests that are trying to [00:14:30] influence government changes.
Hannah McCarthy: So there's this cooling off period between being an elected official and becoming a lobbyist. But a former elected official who eventually becomes a lobbyist can just jump into the race and run for office again with no cooling off period.
Nick Capodice: They can. And there is indeed no secondary cooling off period for that. You can just go round and round.
Hannah McCarthy: There is something that we have talked about before when it comes to lobbying. You know, we touched on it in our episode on who writes bills [00:15:00] and that is that it's not as though the gun lobby or the milk lobby is giving a politician money. The lobbies are talking to them. They're getting to know them, helping them out with information.
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Anna said that congressional staffers work really hard and they get paid very little. So if they're tasked with helping to write a piece of milk centric legislation, say the milk lobby might come along and say, oh, that's really complicated. Let me just help you out with that.
Anna Massoglia: I think that's a [00:15:30] common misconception among Americans, that lobbyists are just going in with bags of cash and giving them to politicians in order to pass a different types of resolutions or legislation. And in reality, it's much more complicated than that. You'll oftentimes see things like nice dinners, events on taking politicians out to different sporting events, games, whatever. There are restrictions on that as well. There is a limit on gifts given to members of Congress. So I think it's like something like $50 where you can't really go over this very low amount for giving [00:16:00] them a dinner like a one on one type of thing. However, there's so many different loopholes to this where you can have publicly accessible events and have these amazing feasts for staffers and members of Congress and putting them in the same room as lobbyists and other advocates who are trying to push these policies. You also, of course, have longer time relationships built between these lobbyists and members of Congress as well as with their staff.
Hannah McCarthy: So lobbyists spend a lot, like a lot of money.
Nick Capodice: Yeah they do. [00:16:30] Some lobbies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Hannah McCarthy: Did Anna say what they get in return for that?
Nick Capodice: She did. Uh, one reason that companies will lobby Congress is to try to get contracts, to say we're the right people for the job. We're the right people to build this building or missile or hydroelectric dam.
Anna Massoglia: And so when, for example, government contractors, defense contractors in particular, were able to track how much they're spending on lobbying every year and then how much they get in terms of government contracts [00:17:00] and the amount that they're spending in lobbying is, of course, huge millions of dollars. It's nothing that I mean, the average person can really even comprehend having at their fingertips. And then you look at how much they got back and it's even it's substantially more, in the billions at that point.
Hannah McCarthy: There's an infographic we've talked about before, Nick, from the website Represent.us, which said a savings account that a regular ol anybody like you and me can get at a bank has a 1% return. [00:17:30] A stock market investment has about a 7% return. But the most powerful lobbies get corporations a 76,000% return.
Nick Capodice: Yep. Though I will add, I told that stat once to an actual lobbyist, and he gave me a very incredulous "Well, I don't know about that." So I am going to keep looking.
Hannah McCarthy: And it's not as though one party does this more than another party does, right? It's both [00:18:00] parties doing this all the time.
Nick Capodice: Yeah right down the middle, Republicans and Democrats. And it is not just on the federal level.
Anna Massoglia: We're also seeing this at state houses as well, where we're seeing lobbyists going and pushing for different state legislation. And so if you have, for example, lobbyists for big business, they might be pushing the same thing in different states across the country, effectively copy pasting legislation and and pushing. That's why you see a lot of very similar laws in different states. For companies, that's very desirable because they don't have to figure out and navigate the different regulatory [00:18:30] systems.
Nick Capodice: Last thing, Hannah, Anna said that there is an issue that has come up more and more recently, which is members of Congress making a lot of money in the stock market. Oh, which.
Hannah McCarthy: They're allowed to do because that is unearned income.
Nick Capodice: Right
Anna Massoglia: Members of Congress are limited with what information they can use. They can't engage in insider trading. But because they are in these meetings oftentimes where they get information before the American public, it puts them in a position where they may be better [00:19:00] situated to know what stocks to trade ahead of the average American, which can in some cases veer into insider trading territory. And so there started to be pushes to ban stock trading by members of Congress entirely or to increase disclosure. And that's something else. That has been another interesting trend of looking at ways different politicians and government officials are able to make money.
Archival: And some of our elected representatives in Congress appear quite skilled at making these predictions, a few even outperforming [00:19:30] Wall Street's most seasoned traders. Abc's Jay O'Brien introduces us..
Nick Capodice: The thing is, it's hard to demonstrate a member of Congress's net worth after they leave office versus before they got the job. Because once they leave office, it's no longer public information. But we do have data estimates on presidents. So, for example, when George W Bush entered office, his net worth was 20 million and now 50 million. When Bill [00:20:00] and Hillary Clinton entered the white House, their net worth was 1.3 million. And now 120 million. People tend to make money when they leave office.
Hannah McCarthy: So now we know all this, but what are we supposed to do about it? Is there anything to do at all? Money and politics have gone hand in hand since the invention of money and politics. Is there anything we should do?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Um, [00:20:30] first off, everyone out there should look up their reps and their senators and see how much money they've received and from whom. Uh, see what committees they've worked on. You can even look up the terms. Members of Congress, stock trades. And you can see in real time what stocks your elected officials are buying and selling right now. And most importantly of all, sure, you can protest and you can petition and hold up cardboard signs at the statehouse and call your senator day in and [00:21:00] day out. Please, please do not stop doing that. But if you want to make a change and you got the dough, you should consider hiring yourself a lobbyist.
Hannah McCarthy: Well, now, how much does a lobbyist go for these days?
Nick Capodice: Well it varies. Uh, you're looking at 5000 to $25,000 a month with a one year minimum contract.
Hannah McCarthy: So for now at least, we are stuck with markers and cardboard.
Nick Capodice: You said it McCarthy. And I don't think I'd have it any other way.
Nick Capodice: Well, [00:21:30] that is the single greatest number of numbers I've ever said in an episode. This episode was made by me Nick Capodice with You Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Christina Phillips is our senior producer and Rebecca Lavoie, our executive producer. Music. In this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, DivKid, ProletR, HoliznaCCO Fabian Tell Mary Riddle, Dajana, Martin Klem, Nico Rengifo, Tigran Viken, Bio Unit, and you think I'm going to get through an episode without Chris Zabriskie? You've [00:22:00] got another think coming. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.