by Adam Andrzejewski, CEO & Founder of OpenTheBooks.com and Author, Operation: Drain The Swamp, an Encounter Broadside publication.
The Ivy League and the federal government might sound like strange bedfellows. However, I know of no other connection that more powerfully illustrates the depth of the swamp in D.C. Recently, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com investigated and found that during a six-year period, the eight colleges of the Ivy League reaped $42 billion in U.S. taxpayer subsidies, special tax breaks, and federal payments on contracts and grants.
It’s no wonder the Ivy League has been called “a hedge fund with classes.”
In fact, the Ivy League’s federal contracting business exceeded its educational mission. School officials collected $25 billion in federal grants and contracts and only $22 billion in undergraduate student tuition.
To make matters worse, many of the Ivy League grants were loaded with taxpayer abuse. Cornell University received $1 million for a study titled, “Where It Hurts the Most to Be Stung by a Bee.” Columbia University received $5.6 million to create fake voicemails from the future describing the world after it’s been decimated by climate change. The Ivy League received so much federal money for these kinds of projects that it out-ranked 16 states on the direct receipt of federal funds.
The Ivies don’t need taxpayer help. We estimate their collective June 2021 endowment exceeds $170 billion — more than enough to function without money from taxpayers without college degrees.
Swampy politicians don’t just live in D.C. I’m from Illinois or, as I like to call it, the Super Bowl of Corruption. Illinois is so corrupt that recently four of nine governors were convicted and sent to federal prison. In 2013, two Illinois governors found themselves in jail at the same time — one from each party: Republican George Ryan and Democrat Rod Blagojevich.
It doesn’t get much better at the local level.
In 2011, Rahm Emanuel ran for mayor and promised to end the historic pay-to-play system in City Hall by which contractors acquire lucrative deals by providing campaign cash to politicians. When he was elected, Emanuel issued an executive order: city contractors were prohibited from giving him campaign cash.
In 2015, Rahm ran for re-election, and I checked Emanuel’s campaign promises. We found that 600 city vendors gave Emanuel $7 million in campaign cash and received $2 billion in city payments.
In America, the citizen is sovereign. We have been given a gift unique in the last 5,000 years of human history: a constitution that secures inalienable rights for each citizen — rights that come from God and not government. In order to hold government accountable, our founders enshrined the right to transparency in our founding document.
Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution states, “… a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” Today, in the age of the Internet and big data, there’s a clear interpretation of this clause: post ‘Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.’
In other words, Open The Books!
I founded the nonpartisan, public charity, OpenTheBooks.com on that vision: to capture and post online, every dime, taxed and spent at every level of government, federal, state, and local. We aspire to empower citizens with the information to hold the political class accountable for tax and spend decisions.
We filed 40,000 Freedom of Information Act requests last year and built the world’s largest private database of public-sector expenditures. We’ve captured all federal spending since the year 2001 along with 49 out of 50 state checkbooks. Last year, for the first time in U.S. history, we captured the salary and pension records of virtually every public employee at every level of government.
Recently, our organization updated an oversight report called, “Mapping The Swamp, A Study of the Administrative State.” In January 2021, we broke national news that Dr. Anthony Fauci was the #1 most highly compensated federal employee — even out-earning the President.
We found that in the 78 largest agencies, the average salary exceeds $100,000, and 500,000 federal bureaucrats “earn” six-figure salaries. One million federal bureaucrats received $1.1 billion in performance bonuses due to the fact that 99.6 percent of all federal bureaucrats are rated “fully successful.”
I’ll let you judge whether that rating sounds reasonable.
We also found serious transparency problems. Performance bonuses are shielded from disclosure by the union contracts. Federal retiree pension payouts are also shielded, even though taxpayers help fund and guarantee them.
Bottom line? We have a lot of work to do. In June 2021, the Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed another federal holiday, Juneteenth. Now, the average federal bureaucrat gets 44 days of paid time off each year.
But there’s more bad news: the biggest swamps are in our own back yards. State and local governments dwarf the federal swamp. Of the two million public employees earning more than $100,000 per year, 1.7 million are employed by state and local governments.
In Texas, a city manager was paid-out $1.1 million in the two years before retirement. In Chicago, the tree trimmers make more than $100,000. In New York City, the school district janitors out-earn the principals at up to $200,000, and in Los Angeles County, the lifeguards make up to $392,000.
It’s time to hold our local officials accountable for tax and spend decisions.
We can’t complain about Washington, D.C., if we can’t hold our local officials accountable. It’s time to fact check our politicians and their promises, and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed promised to solve her city’s homelessness and public defecation disaster. After her first year in office, we mapped the San Francisco human waste challenge by placing a brown colored pin in each location where human waste had been reported. We found a brownout in the Bay Area. In 2011, there were 5,500 reports. In 2015, that number increased to 13,326. In 2017, there were 20,668 reports, and in 2019 there were 31,000. Over this nine-year period, there were 140,000 reports — a human health catastrophe.
Each year in all 50 states we file a Freedom of Information Act request for state checkbooks. In 49 states, we get line-by-line state expenditures. Only California Controller Betty Yee rejected our request. She claimed (incredibly) that she couldn’t locate any of the transactions. Yee admits to paying 49 million individual bills last year and spending $320 billion, yet she won’t provide a single transaction record. So, last year, we sued California to begin the process of forcing open state expenditures.
We’ve never lost a state checkbook transparency fight, and when we open the books in California, we’ll start by cross-referencing Governor Galvin Newsome’s campaign donor disclosures with the state checkbook vendor list.
We did this in Oregon and discovered that Governor Kate Brown solicited 557 state vendors for $2.6 million in campaign cash — and those vendors reaped $4.4 billion in state payments.
We also investigated New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and found that he solicited 347 state vendors for $6.3 million in campaign cash — and those vendors reaped $7 billion in state payments.
We’ll never make America great if we can’t make it accountable — accountable both to this generation as well as future generations.
The national debt is pushing $30 trillion. We’re adding $1 trillion in budget deficits each year and $4 billion each day. President Biden has a stunning $6 trillion spending agenda. Too many times, patronage Republicans in Congress joined Democrats to drain the U.S. Treasury from the left and the right.
OpentheBooks.com has outlined a simple, four-point strategy: 1) Open and audit the books; 2) Declare war on waste; 3) incentivize every government employee to blow the whistle on government waste; and 4) report the progress to the American people.
- Federal Covid-19 aid — here’s a small sample of what we found:
- $100 million flowed to the 50 richest places — congressional “bailout” relief to America’s wealthiest towns.
- $168 million flowed to the eight Ivy League colleges — remember they have a $170 billion endowment.
- $400 billion — Criminals, con artists, and crime syndicates stole unemployment benefits in the largest public fraud in the history of America (and no one is talking about it)!
- Improper and Mistaken Payments — Improper and mistaken payments either went to the wrong person, were cut for the wrong amount, or were provided under the wrong rule.Federal agencies admitted to paying $1 billion last year to people with death certificates on file.Social Security admitted to $10 billion in overpayments last year. There are six million active Social Security numbers for people over the age of 112, but there are only 40 people in the world over the age of 112.
Medicare and Medicaid admitted to overpayments of $103 billion in 2020.
Last year, the Internal Revenue Service admitted that $1 of every $4 paid out on the Earned Income Tax Program was improperly or mistakenly paid to a tune of $18.4 billion.
Since 2004, the 20 largest federal agencies admit to mistaken and improper payments of $2.6 trillion.
This government is not run by technocrats. It’s institutionalized bureaucratic incompetence with tenure.
Transparency is revolutionizing U.S. public policy and politics, but we can’t do it alone. Visit OpentheBooks.com to join us and support the Transparency Revolution!