From LifeSiteNews

By Matt Lamb

“Our country is $33 trillion in debt. Taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for Dr. Fauci’s security detail, especially when Fauci was one of the highest-paid federal employees in the U.S”

American taxpayers spent at least $15 million on security and a private driver for Dr. Anthony Fauci after he left his government job.

Open the Books obtained “memorandum of understanding” covering January 4, 2023 through September 20, 2024 along with independent journalist Jordan Schachtel.

The government watchdog group said it is seeking information on if the contract is still in force. Fauci retired at the end of 2022.

The highest-paid federal employee, Fauci left the government after decades of work. For almost two years, if not longer, taxpayers spent money so he could have a private driver. This despite the fact that Fauci has an estimated net worth of $11 million and continues to profit off his experience in the government, including writing a book and speaking at events.

The exact specifics of the agreement are new. However, Republicans have previously criticized the special arrangement, after it came to light last year that Fauci continued to receive perks despite ostensibly retiring.

“When I discovered that Dr. Fauci still had a taxpayer-funded driver and personal guards after he stepped down, I felt that it was another example of Washington bureaucrats putting themselves above the American people,” Congressman Dale Strong said last year. He introduced legislation to end the special agreement.

“Our country is $33 trillion in debt. Taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for Dr. Fauci’s security detail, especially when Fauci was one of the highest-paid federal employees in the U.S,” Strong said.

The special deal comes after Fauci botched the handling of COVID-19, including by downplaying concerns it leaked from a lab in China. He also made misleading statements about the National Institutes of Health and its connection to a controversial lab in Wuhan, China.

He also made incorrect, and incredibly damaging, statements to the American public about the need for widespread lockdowns and other social restrictions and claimed that the COVID shots were both “safe” and “effective” against the spread of the virus. Faced with criticism, Fauci claimed that the attacks on him were really assaults on “science.”

As Open the Books reminds readers:

But his detractors recall a government official who led the fight to implement years-long draconian restrictions upon the American people, which devastated the fabric of U.S. society, greatly harmed the economy and caused all kinds of additional negative repercussions – including widespread learning loss among America’s youth. Fauci was never shy to advocate for lockdowns, social distancing, school closures, business closures, mask mandates, and vaccine passports from his powerful federal perch during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Senator Rand Paul, a frequent critic of Fauci, criticized Fauci’s taxpayer-funded arrangement.

“No more $ for the guy who funded dangerous research in Wuhan.,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Open the Books spokesman Christopher Neefus said the NIH has a “pattern of obfuscation when it comes to the NIH’s financial arrangements.”

“Whether it’s Dr. Fauci’s contract and full compensation, or the NIH’s multibillion-dollar royalty complex, we’ve been working for years to get full transparency,” Neefus told National Review.

Fauci’s support for the shot included going door-to-door with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to browbeat residents into taking the jabs.

A PBS profile showed Bowser, who broke her own forced masking rules, going door-to-door with a crowd of people inquiring about their personal choices concerning shots.

“They need a push, a push, and a drag,” Mayor Bowser says in one clip, to Fauci’s approval, as LifeSiteNews previously reported.

Fauci, who retired at the end of December 2022, can be seen on the documentary criticizing Republican states and the people in those states in particular who declined to take the abortion-tainted jab.

“[Red states] are going to keep the outbreak smoldering in the country [because they won’t get jabbed],” he tells Bowser, who is part of the canvassing crowd. The video is from June 2021. “It’s so crazy. They’re not doing it because they say they don’t want to. They’re Republicans. They don’t like being told what to do. We need to break that.”