Fauci’s side hustle: Emails reveal taxpayer-funded staff helped pursue lucrative cash prizes

By SUZANNE DOWNING

July 26, 2026 – While Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of the highest-paid officials in the federal government, newly released documents show that he was also collecting prestigious awards, some carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money. He had help from government employees and the very scientists whose research and institutions depended on funding from the agency he led.

The emails and ethics records were released Friday by Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, as part of a package titled “Fauci’s Side Hustle.”

The largest foreign award identified by Paul’s committee involved a wire transfer of approximately $900,000. Other prizes awarded during the Covid era added hundreds of thousands of dollars to Fauci’s compensation beyond his government salary.

The records show Fauci soliciting nominations, exchanging favors with prominent researchers, and relying on taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health employees to help assemble nomination materials and navigate federal ethics reviews.

One of those researchers was Dr. Barton F. Haynes, director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and a longtime Fauci collaborator whose work received substantial funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, during the time when Fauci ran the agency.

In October 2018, Fauci contacted Haynes about several major scientific awards. Haynes nominated Fauci for the 2019 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine and confirmed the nomination by email.

Fauci thanked him and offered to provide any additional information he needed.

The correspondence then turned to the Heinz Awards. Fauci asked Haynes to nominate him for the award’s Human Condition category and discussed the supporting materials that would be required, including the nominator’s curriculum vitae.

“You bet!!! Let’s do it,” Haynes replied, according to the released emails.

They also discussed the Dan David Prize, although a nomination was postponed that year because the prize’s selected theme was not focused on science or medicine.

The exchanges expose a relationship between a researcher supported by millions of dollars in federal funding and the powerful official overseeing that funding system asking for nominations for prestigious and potentially lucrative prizes.

Haynes and Fauci had worked together for decades, dating to Haynes’ time at NIH during the 1970s and 1980s. Duke’s vaccine institute later became a major participant in federally funded HIV and vaccine-research programs, including large NIAID-supported consortia.

Other records show NIH personnel helping prepare Fauci’s award submissions. Fauci aide Greg Folkers and other federal employees worked on supporting materials, including a narrative prepared for a 2020 Dan David Prize nomination highlighting Fauci’s role in the government’s Covid-19 response and support for messenger RNA vaccine development.

Dr. Charles Dinarello, an immunologist and longtime Fauci associate, was also involved in drafting or reviewing nomination materials.

Senior NIH officials and agency lawyers helped process the awards. Dr. Lawrence Tabak, then one of NIH’s highest-ranking officials, and ethics personnel reviewed proposed prizes, sought expedited clearances and determined which cash payments Fauci could accept under federal ethics regulations.

Paul’s committee characterized Tabak as effectively acting as Fauci’s “personal awards manager.”

The records indicate that some awards were approved under ethics provisions allowing federal employees to accept prizes recognizing public service. Other cash components were declined, limited or otherwise restricted, including portions of the Lienhard Award.

The documents indicate that NIH and Department of Health and Human Services ethics officials reviewed the awards under existing rules. The newly released material does not include a formal finding that Fauci violated federal ethics laws, nor does it establish that he made a specific funding decision in exchange for a nomination.

But Paul’s release raises broader questions about whether the head of a grant-making federal agency should solicit award nominations from researchers whose careers and institutions may depend heavily on that agency — and whether federal employees should spend government time preparing materials that could result in large personal payments to their boss.

Fauci, now 85 years old, directed NIAID from 1984 until his retirement at the end of 2022. During the pandemic, his annual federal compensation climbed above $400,000, making him the highest-paid federal employee in the country at the time.

The award records are the latest release in Paul’s broader investigation of NIH, federally funded research and the origins of Covid-19. The committee has also published documents involving EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, discussions among scientists about a possible laboratory origin of the virus and contacts between public-health officials and the intelligence community.

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Fauci is scheduled to testify before Paul’s committee at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, July 29, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The appearance follows a subpoena and years of bitter public clashes between the two men over gain-of-function research, federal funding of coronavirus experiments and Fauci’s previous testimony to Congress.

The complete “Fauci’s Side Hustle” document package is available in Sen. Paul’s Reading Room. Details for Fauci’s upcoming appearance are posted on the Senate committee’s hearing page.

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