by WorldTribune Staff, November 15, 2020
A cancer charity started by Joe Biden paid millions to its staff and spent extravagantly on conferences and travel, but little, if any, money went to actual cancer research, federal filings show.
Most of the more than $4 million in contributions to the Biden Cancer Initiative in 2017 and 2018 was used for staff payroll, tax filings show.
The charity was founded in 2017 by the former vice president and his wife Jill Biden to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes,” according to its IRS mission statement.
Biden’s charity gave out no grants for cancer research in two years before shutting down, the New York Post noted in a Nov. 14 report.
The so-called charity took in $4,809,619 in contributions in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, and spent $3,070,301 on payroll in those two years. The group’s president, Gregory Simon, was paid $429,850 in fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019), according to the charity’s most recent federal tax filings.
“Simon, a former Pfizer executive and longtime health care lobbyist who headed up the White House’s cancer task force in the Obama administration, saw his salary nearly double from the $224,539 he made in fiscal 2017,” the Post reported, citing federal tax filings.
An analysis of nonprofits by Charity Navigator, which rates charities for effectiveness, found that mid-to-large-sized nonprofits paid their chief executives an average salary of $126,000 per year — far less than what the Biden Cancer Initiative paid Simon. Charity Navigator’s primary criterion for rating charities is whether they “spend at least 75 percent of their expenses directly on their programs.”
Danielle Carnival, former chief of staff for Obama’s cancer initiative, the Cancer Moonshot Task Force, took home $258,207 from the Biden “charity” in 2018.
Biden’s charity also spent $56,738 on conferences and $59,356 on travel in 2017. The following year, the travel expenditure swelled to $97,149, and the non-profit spent $742,953 on conferences, tax filings show.
A June report for the Washington Free Beacon noted: “The Biden cancer group’s financial disclosures may raise new questions about whether the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee allowed associates to profit off their access to him. Before going on to receive six-figure salaries from the Biden Cancer Initiative, Simon and the initiative’s vice president, Danielle Carnival, previously worked for the Obama administration’s Cancer Moonshot program. Biden’s son Hunter received $50,000 a month to sit on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma despite an apparent lack of qualifications. James Biden, Joe Biden’s brother, joined a construction firm in 2010 that later won a $1.5 billion contract to build homes in Iraq while Biden oversaw Iraq policy. Biden’s presidential campaign has been plagued with questions about Hunter’s and James’s financial activities.”
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