OpenTheBooks’s Adam Andrzejewski Exposes Billions in Wasteful Government Spending, Shocking Payments to China, Russia

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “We’re borrowing money from China to pay Chinese entities—that doesn’t make any sense,” says the CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.com.

In this episode, I sit down with Adam Andrzejewski.

Through tens of thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests, this government watchdog has compiled and made public almost all U.S. money taxed and spent, at every level of government, across all 50 states.

“[The Government Accountability Office] were charged by Congress at taking a look at the payments into China; they found $49 million. We found $490 million because we actually dug a little deeper. We dug into the sub-grants,” Mr. Andrzejewski says.

“We do the hard work so you can hold the political class accountable for tax and spend decisions.”

We discuss the problem of earmarks—what Mr. Andrzejewski calls Congress’s “currency of corruption.”

“Earmarks were brought back after a 10-year ban because of secret votes in the Republican caucus, where they voted to join Pelosi Democrats to bring back the practice,” he says.

We also discuss government contracts and grants to adversaries nations and the militarization of our federal agencies.

“There are 76 traditional, paper-pushing, regulatory, civil administrative agencies that have now armed up,” says Mr. Andrzejewski. “Who knew that the National Institutes of Health had a police force of over 100 officers?”

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Adam Andrzejewski, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Great to have you back.

Adam Andrzejewski:
Thanks, Jan. Thanks for having me back.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have a lot to talk about. You’ve been doing some amazing reports with Senator Ernst on China and Russia. You’ve got this whole piece on earmarks. With the whole earmark world I’m still struggling to grasp how it exists and functions. Let’s start on the China and Russia side. Over the last five years, $1.3 billion has gone to our adversaries, China and Russia. Does that make any sense ? What’s going on?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
It is mystifying. We’re borrowing money from China to pay Chinese entities. That doesn’t make any sense. At openthebooks.com, we took a look at the payments to the adversarial nations of China and Russia, and we found $1.3 billion flowed over the course of the last five years. The government accountability office was charged by Congress with taking a look at the payments into China.

They found $49 million. We found $490 million because we actually dug a little deeper. We dug into the subgrants. What nobody can follow is the tier-two and tier-three subgrants. Those aren’t even disclosed right now . The $1.3 billion just may be the tip of the iceberg.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s wild. One of the things that you found was $2 million going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That was a place where bioweapons development was being done along with gain of function experiments.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
Since 2014, $2 million has gone into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. According to the latest federal government audits, only $1.4 million was ever paid out. Let’s break down the $2 million worth of appropriations to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. You’ve got $600,000 that was paid by subgrants through EcoHealth Alliance from the National Institutes of Health.

These are the payments being questioned as to whether or not Fauci, the former director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health [NIH], funded gain of function.

You also have $1.1 million funding the Wuhan Institute through a U.S. foreign aid entity, the USAID [U. S. Agency for International Development], again by subgrants through EcoHealth Alliance. On that $1.1 million, now it is said that only $800,000 was ever paid out. The rest of the payments were stopped.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the significance of that?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
The significance is that this week after three years the Biden administration finally stopped all federal payments to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It’s about time. This is the spot on earth that has probably received the most scrutiny out of any U.S. aid recipient in the entire federal checkbook. Finally, after three years, the Biden Administration says they’re formally cutting any additional money.

They had friends in high places. As late as May of 2021 in the well of the Senate, Dr. Anthony Fauci was answering questions from U.S. Senator John Kennedy out of Louisiana. Fauci said he found the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists as very competent and trustworthy.

Speaker 3:
In our experience with grantees, including Chinese grantees, which we’ve had interactions with for a very long period of time, they’re very competent, trustworthy scientists. I’m not talking about anything else in China. I’m talking about the scientists that you would expect would abide by the conditions of the grant, which they’ve done in the years that we’ve had interactions with them.

Speaker 4:
You don’t think the Chinese would lie to you?

Speaker 3:
When you say the Chinese, the Chinese are a rather broad group. I know the scientists that we’ve dealt with have been trustworthy.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s either a kind of gullibility or something much worse. I’ve been struggling to figure out what the nature of that thinking was given the briefings available to everybody about what is going on there and many other places in China in their biological laboratories.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
In 2021, that U.S, aid agency, USAID, issued a letter to a member of Congress saying that they had paid out $1.1 million in subgrants to the Wuhan Institute. Now, the government accountability office says, “No, wait a second. Only $800,000 was paid out on that.” The Wuhan Institute of Virology has always been a black box with little transparency and even less accountability.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the status of all these royalties payouts out of the NIH? Were you trying to get to the bottom of this?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
In fall of 2021, our organization at openthebooks.com filed a Federal Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] request with the NIH for their third-party royalty database. A third-party royalty is paid by a pharmaceutical company to the NIH for an invention by a U.S. government scientist in a government lab, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. Again, this is a U.S. government, taxpayer-paid salary. They invent something, then they license it to the private sector to monetize the invention. A royalty payment is paid back to the agency in a split with the scientist. We wanted a copy of that database.

During the pandemic, the American people started to feel that big government was very close to big pharma. That database will tell us just how close they were. On our Freedom of Information Act request, the NIH actually ignored it. We sued them right away with Judicial Watch as our legal partner, and we opened up that database—3,000 pages over a decade, with over 50,000 payments to 2,400 scientists.

But we can only see the top line summary numbers. $325 million was paid from the industry to the agency, its leadership, and its scientists, enriching them. Here’s what we can’t see. NIH is still redacting the name of a third-party payer—think pharmaceutical company. We don’t know who paid over $300 million worth of royalties. We don’t know the amount to the individual scientists.

They’re redacting the amount to the individual scientists, including Fauci and Francis Collins. We don’t know what they invented in the taxpayer paid labs. They’re redacting the invention number and the license number. This week there was movement in the U.S. Senate by Rand Paul who’s made this an issue. You remember when he quizzed Fauci twice in 2022 in the Senate on his third-party royalties.

Fauci refused to disclose any of this information, just like the agency is refusing to disclose the information. Rand Paul submitted an amendment in a subcommittee in the Senate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders had the political muscle to stop Rand Paul’s amendment, which would’ve opened up the entire third-party royalty complex. Unfortunately, Lisa Murkowski from Alaska crossed party lines and voted with Bernie Sanders to keep these royalties secret.

Mr. Jekielek:
Given the amount of conflict of interest that we’ve become aware of over the last three-plus years, you would think this would be important.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
It is important. Because we know every year the NIH doles out $32 billion worth of grant-making to over 50,000 recipients. Jan, that buys you a lot of friends, and that buys you a lot of allies. It basically buys you the entire U.S. healthcare complex. All the research is coming back through the other door as hundreds of millions worth of these third-party royalties over the last decade. We need to see the flow of funds. Every single one of those third-party royalty payments is a potential conflict of interest.

Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely. Let’s go back to China and Russia, the $1.3 billion over the last five years. Can you offer a few interesting tidbits that you found?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
$1.4 million was through a domestic farm commodities program for U.S. school districts across the country to feed our K-12 students domestic agriculture products. But it wasn’t done domestically. $1.4 million went to a Chinese entity to supply America’s K-12 schools with a Chinese agriculture commodity. We found $6 million, and this is particularly troubling, through the Department of Defense on an IT contract with a Chinese contractor on a very sensitive program, that in a crisis would deliver manpower, troops and supplies to the crisis point.

This $6 million was done through a Chinese IT contractor. If you’re a Chinese IT contractor, you are 100 percent in line with the CCP. We found the State Department gave $60 million worth of contracts to Chinese entities, including $25,000 to the Chinese surfing community who had a beach party with state department officials. It was all about “climate change education.”

Mr. Jekielek:
For the benefit of our viewers, please remind them we’re talking about $1.3 billion being paid out to China and Russia in the current context.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
The split on that is about 490 million went to China over five years. The rest, about 800 million-plus, went to entities in Russia. It doesn’t get any better with our payments to Russian entities. For example, we have $24 million paid to a Russian contractor to do security for our embassies. We’ve got $600,000 paid to Russian transportation companies to move our confidential intelligence briefing pouch. Jan, in America, right here in Washington DC, do you think Putin has an American contractor securing his confidential diplomatic pouch? Not a chance, but that’s what we do in Russia.

Mr. Jekielek:
How much of this would be happening during the Russia-Ukraine war, out of curiosity? Do you have a sense of that?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
Our payments were up until the first quarter of 2023. There’s a $5 million payment of U.S. taxpayer money to a Russian health insurance provider that actually was sanctioned during this period of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s amazing when we talk about these numbers. When I look through your material, we’re talking a few million here, a billion there,. These are actually significant amounts of money. You almost forget that as you’re pouring through these documents. We haven’t even started on the earmarks yet.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
For a watchdog, it’s a target-rich environment right now in Washington DC. The American people really get a sense of that. They’re tired of the overspending, and they’re tired of the corruption. It used to be that we only knew one example of misspending, and that was the bridge to nowhere in Alaska. At openthebooks.com, our whole mission is to not only open the books and audit them, but also to educate the American people on exactly where your tax dollar is being spent.

Mr. Jekielek:
As a reminder to our viewers, you can actually go to openthebooks.com and search for things. It’s a highly searchable, absolutely fascinating database if you want to see what crazy things money is being spent on.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
That’s why we believe transparency revolutionizes United States public policy and politics. I encourage everybody watching the program to come to our website at openthebooks.com and take a look. Because we have nearly every dime taxed and spent at every level of government across the entire country available for search on our website.

I’m talking federal spending, all 50 state checkbooks, and 15,000 municipal level checkbooks right down to your local school district. We have $25 million in salaries, nearly every single salary of a public employee at every level of government across the entire country. It took us 55,000 Freedom of Information Act requests just last year to compile all of this. We do the hard work so you could hold the political class accountable for their tax and spending decisions.

Mr. Jekielek:
Talking about accountability, let’s jump into your earmarks report. Again, there might be people who don’t even know what earmarks are. Please give us a quick overview and then let’s dive into it. There are some absolutely amazing things that you found.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
Here’s the definition of an earmark. It’s a pet project requested by a member of Congress for their own district. People have described it as fleece, pork, log rolling, the currency of corruption in Congress, pork belly shame, and the earmark favor factory. Others have described it as legal bribery to put member votes on big spending, omnibus bills.

It is the currency of corruption in Congress. Regarding bringing back earmarks, they were actually banned for 10 years. It has been the equivalent of an open bar for a bunch of alcoholics. Republicans and Democrats are addicted to spending our taxpayer money and these earmarks grease the process.

Mr. Jekielek:
It doesn’t all sound that bad, because every member’s job is to represent the people in their district or in their state. You would expect they would be doing something to support their districts or states.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
Earmarks are an end run around regular order in the appropriations process in Congress. You do an earmark basically to circumvent the process of getting a line and budget bill going through committee and subcommittee hearings, having a full and public vetting on every line of that legislation, and having votes in those committees all the way along until it reaches the floor. Then you get an up or down vote.

An earmark is totally different. They have vague wording, and there’s thousands of them. It’s hard to give them any scrutiny. The amounts are large and getting larger. There’s no public purpose to compel working, middle-class taxpayers in Arkansas to fund a $3 million New York earmark into an Ivy League college like Columbia University, which already has a $13.3 billion endowment. You get all kinds of these pork projects that are just unnecessary.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are earmarks that just go directly into large endowments. That is obviously a shocking reality. You found all sorts of other things as well.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
We did. It just starts with some of the most powerful people in Congress, two retiring U.S. senators, one a Democrat, one a Republican, that sat in leadership positions on the Senate Appropriations Committee. The chairman, Democrat Patrick Leahy, was retiring. He earmarked $30 million to the University of Vermont for their Honors College.

After he retired in May just two months ago, the college renamed the Honors College after Senator Patrick Leahy. He also received from the president of the University of Vermont a permanent position as a presidential fellow at the university. Then Leahy did it again with a $34 million earmark to the Burlington International Airport.

In April, the city council renamed the airport after Patrick Leahy. Let’s go to the Republican, Patrick Leahy’s colleague on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Richard Shelby, who is also retiring. He earmarks $50 million to his alma mater, the University of Alabama. The $50 million earmark didn’t go for a project, it went into their endowment. They already had a billion dollars in their endowment.

Jan, think about this, they borrowed $50 million, and all these earmarks are borrowed against the national debt. They borrowed it against the national debt to stuff it in the University of Alabama endowment, which was already a billion dollars, for a school that pays their football coach $11 million a year.

Mr. Jekielek:
What was the total budget of earmarks last year?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
In the last omnibus spending bill, the bill was $1.7 trillion. There were $16 billion worth of these pet projects, 7,500 of them stuffed into that bill. Seven out of the top 10 earmarkers were actually Republicans. Those seven Republicans earmarked $3.1 billion. Republicans in 21 states out-earmarked their Democratic colleagues, including the states of Texas; 500 million to 300 million, and Florida; 450 million to 250 million.

You had nine members of the Republican Freedom Caucus, who are known to be the most fiscally conservative. They earmarked 72 projects for half-a-billion dollars, $490 million. The situation is only getting worse. Breaking news yesterday was that the top 63 earmarkers for 2024 in the House are Republicans.

Mr. Jekielek:
Fascinating. The attitude is, “If we can do this, we should do it. We’ve got this capability.”

Mr. Andrzejewski:
Earmarks are the currency of corruption in Congress. What you’ve just articulated, Jan, I really want to cover, because it is the Mary Poppins method of governing. A little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down, but there’s no sugar left.

I want to use as my evidence; the national debt in 1980, a little over 200 years into the Republic, stood at less than $1 trillion. Today, a little over 40 years later, there is $32.5 trillion of national debt. This could now be the death of a democracy. When a democracy realizes they can vote themselves generous benefits from the Federal Treasury, that’s the first step to collapse.

Mr. Jekielek:
That makes sense. What have you developed here?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
We can go back to 1887 when the Scottish professor at the University of Edinburgh studied this. He said that the average length of the world’s greatest civilization is 200 years. It starts to fall apart and the wheels come off when their legislatures realize they can vote themselves those general benefits from the Federal Treasury. He said that after that collapse, the next step is always dictatorship.

The way to cheat history is through radical transparency—every dime, online, in real time. Earmarks are a great example of this. We need to hold the powerful accountable, and we need to hold Republicans accountable who are being absolutely hypocritical on spending. They say they want less spending, but they’ve brought back this earmarking process, this currency of corruption that does end runs around regular order.

Republicans should be doing regular order. They should not be instituting earmarks, which are irregular. We’re calling on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to have no secrets. Earmarks were brought back after a 10-year ban because of secret votes in the Republican caucus where they voted to join Pelosi and the Democrats to bring back the practice.

McCarthy needs to call a public vote in the well of the House. We need to see who’s in and who’s out on earmarks. No secrets. Who in the Republican caucus is in, McCarthy included? McCarthy doesn’t take earmarks personally, but he allowed the secret vote for the last two years. Who thought this was a good idea?

Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve also covered the militarization of some of our agencies, which a lot of our viewers are concerned about. The one that people are most aware of is the IRS. What is the actual case for the IRS to have weaponized law enforcement officers?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
Jan, at openthebooks.com, we are the experts on the militarization of the federal agencies. If you’re hearing about the militarization of the IRS or any other federal agency, that’s in our data. I’m not even sure anybody else knows how to quantify the purchase of guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment by the rank-and-file federal agencies.

The IRS spokesman, because we’ve asked repeatedly over the years, will tell you that they have to deal with a lot of bad hombres and bad actors. They go after the worst of the worst. At this point, the American people don’t think the tax man should be the law enforcement man as well. There needs to be a difference.

The IRS is blurring the lines between a civil administrative agency and a law enforcement agency. There is now legislation introduced in the House by Matt Gaetz, and in the Senate by Joni Ernst, the junior senator from Iowa, to disarm the IRS.

At openthebooks.com, we have a petition, and you can come to our website. We want to put tens of thousands of signatures on that to backstop the legislation in Congress that will create a division between the administrative and law enforcement side of the IRS, and transfer the arrest and firearm authority of the IRS to traditional law enforcement agencies.

Mr. Jekielek:
How common is this practice among agencies, taking on this law enforcement role? It’s a slow ebb, it starts small, and then it grows. That’s what we see in these bureaucracies.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
Let’s talk about the entire militarization of the federal complex. Today, incredibly, there are more federal officers with arrest and firearm authority at 200,000 than there are United States Marines at 186,000. Since the year 2006, we’ve been able to quantify at openthebooks.com, that 103 federal agencies have spent $3.7 billion on the purchase of guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment.

Here’s how that breaks down. There are 27 traditional law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, U.S. Marshals, or Secret Service. These are the agencies housed under the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security. There are 76 traditional paper-pushing regulatory civil administrative agencies that have now armed up.

I’m talking the Department of Education, Health and Human Services. Who knew that the National Institutes of Health had a police force of 100 officers? I’m talking about the Environmental Protection Agency, and of course, folks know about the IRS. We need to scale back the federal arsenal.

Think about this. After grabbing legal power, these federal agencies are amassing firepower. The gun locker at the Internal Revenue Service has cost $35.2 million since 2006, with the purchase of guns, ammunition, and military style equipment. Let’s talk about their gun locker pre-pandemic. It was 4,500 guns, including 5 million rounds of ammunition that they stockpiled. If you break their gun locker down, you will find over 600 shotguns, 500 AR-15 Smith and Wesson-style rifles.

Post-pandemic, you find the IRS purchase of guns, ammunition, and military style equipment peaking in 2020 and 2021. Since the pandemic, the IRS spent $10 million on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment, including a million dollars’ worth of new guns. Half-a-million dollars of those AR-15 Smith and Wesson rifles and half-a-million dollars’ worth of shotguns. You have half-a-million dollars’ worth of tactical equipment. There are 2,100 IRS special agents. They have so much gear that they spent $350,000 on bags for their tactical gear. That’s a lot of gear, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
It is. Have you reached out to any of these agencies to actually find out why they need this? I can imagine some reasons. Do you have a sense of this?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
The IRS has15 submachine guns in their basement. With 2,100 special agents, the thinking is they’re going to add 500 or 600 special agents as the IRS increases 3 percent of their total headcount. We estimate that over the course of the next five years, the IRS with their 2,600 agents, as compared to 12,200 local police departments, will be one of the 100 largest police departments in the country.

Mr. Jekielek:
Again, what is the purpose?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
It’s about size, scope, and power. They want to have that command and control within the agency.

Mr. Jekielek:
Adam, it’s always incredibly eye-opening to talk to you. I always end up being stunned and amazed. You’re doing very, very valuable work, because having that accountability and transparency is so critical. What were your biggest wins this last year?

Mr. Andrzejewski:
In 2023, we’re racking up some good wins here. Right away in January when the Republicans took control of Congress, they instituted for the first time a rule, a 72-hour read-the-bill rule, a timeout just so we know what’s in the legislation before the vote. That is the fruition of a two-year public policy campaign at openthebooks.com. We put this in the Wall Street Journal and my column at Forbes. We put tens of thousands of petition signatures together backing that.

The Republicans to their credit, adopted that rule when they took control in the house. In March, we had a big victory working with Representative Elise Stefanik and House Republican leadership. We gave oversight to the Pentagon’s K-12 public schools in their office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Our research and oversight helped cancel that DEI office and remove the head of that office. She was reassigned within the Pentagon.

That was a big victory. We actually scaled back some government over there in the K-12 public schools. With the Russia and China payments, Senator Joni Ernst has the TRACKS Act that would open all payments at every level, including second and third-tier subgrants, which aren’t disclosed right now as a matter of law in the adversarial nations. Then what’s coming down the pike shortly is our oversight report on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

We show that the headcounts at the EPA are rapidly advancing. Soon they’ll have 20,000 employees, which is about 50 percent higher than where they were when Donald Trump left office. They’ve lawyered up, and they’ve armed up. Every year they spend about $150 million between their criminal investigation division and their homeland security division. The flywheel is spinning a lot faster. It is a target-rich environment in Washington DC for a watchdog.

Mr. Jekielek:
Adam Andrzejewski, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Andrzejewski:
Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Adam Andrzejewski and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.