Rand Paul Wants to Know Who’s Been Cutting Checks to Government Scientists in Secret

For over a decade, thousands of federal scientists have collected royalty payments tied to their government research. How much money. Which companies paid it. Why. The public still doesn’t know any of that, because the agencies writing the checks have spent years refusing to say.

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Rand Paul’s Royalty Transparency Act aims to close that gap for good. The bill would require federal employees, including scientists at agencies like the NIH, to publicly disclose any royalty payments they receive connected to their government service, the same way other financial conflicts of interest already get reported. It would also force members of federal advisory committees, the panels that recommend everything from vaccine schedules to drug approvals, to make their financial disclosures public for the first time.

Why does this take an act of Congress to fix something that sounds like basic common sense?

Because the NIH has spent years actively fighting to keep the numbers hidden. Watchdog group Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request back in 2021 just to find out which employees were receiving royalties. What came back was heavily redacted. When the NIH finally released additional documents years later, the actual payment amounts were still blacked out. The organization eventually had to sue, represented by Judicial Watch, just to pry loose more information, and even then, individual payment amounts, the identity of the paying companies, and the specific patents involved all stayed hidden from public view.

What Open the Books did manage to uncover through litigation should stop anyone defending the current system. Roughly 2,400 NIH scientists were awarded more than $300 million in royalties over the past decade, an average of $135,000 per scientist. Separately, the organization found that since 2010, roughly $650 million in third-party royalty payments has flowed into the agency and its scientists. That’s not petty cash. That’s a massive, largely invisible financial relationship between government researchers and the pharmaceutical companies whose products those same researchers may later be reviewing, approving, or recommending.

Isn’t that exactly the kind of conflict of interest the public has a right to see?

Paul has been chasing this problem since well before it became a bill. He directly confronted Anthony Fauci about it in a Senate hearing years ago, and by Paul’s own account, Fauci’s response amounted to telling the public it was none of their business. “This is something that I inquired when I had Anthony Fauci in our committee,” Paul said. “I’d said, you know, we need to know this, this is a basic conflict of interest problem, and he basically thumbed his nose at the American people.” Fauci’s evasiveness wasn’t a one-time slip either. Reporting on a separate hearing described him as evasive and misleading yet again when pressed on the same royalty question, offering the same non-answer about existing statutes not technically requiring disclosure.

The COVID years are exactly why this stopped being an abstract accountability question for Paul. “During COVID, we had vaccines that were developed by Pfizer and Moderna. And then these vaccines were mandated on people throughout government, throughout the military, by different governors around the country, and yet, we don’t know whether the people that were approving either the vaccines or the mandates were receiving money from big Pharma,” Paul explained. That’s not a hypothetical concern. Advisory committees like the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices make recommendations that ripple out into mandates affecting millions of Americans. If members of those committees are quietly collecting royalty checks from the same companies whose products they’re evaluating, the public deserves to know before the recommendation gets made, not years later through a lawsuit.

The bill isn’t a partisan wish list either. It passed out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on a unanimous 12-0 vote, drawing support from figures across the political spectrum who all landed on the same basic principle. Taxpayers have a right to know when the people making decisions about their health are also being paid by the industries those decisions affect.

Paul reintroduced the legislation again this year, continuing a fight he’s now waged across multiple congressional sessions against an agency that has consistently chosen litigation and redaction over simply opening the books. As Adam Andrzejewski of Open the Books put it, the American people deserve to finally “follow the money.” Right now, thanks to years of NIH stonewalling, they still can’t.