Republican Senator Roger Marshall is planning to introduce the Financial Accountability for Uniquely Compensated Individuals (FAUCI) Act, as he continues attempts to get disclosures of financial gains made by the Chief Medical Adviser to the President, Anthony Fauci, after whom the Bill was apparently named.
The legislation, should it be passed, will force the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) to submit a list of persons whose financial disclosures have not been released publicly. Fauci might be affected by the Bill's passage as, according to a Forbes article, the top US doctor failed to publicly disclose his assets and income, such as salary, bonds, stocks and royalty payments for 2020 and 2021.
The doctor's spokesman hadn't provided disclosures in response to a New York Post request. Marshall therefore grilled Fauci on the matter laid out in the report, stressing the doctor's exorbitant financial gains during the period under advisement and wondered what his financial interests might be.
"As the highest-paid employee in the entire federal government, yes or no, would you be willing to submit to Congress and the public a financial disclosure that includes your past and present investments?"
Fauci insisted that he systematically disclosed his financial gains over the past 35 years or so. The top doctor was apparently frustrated by the questioning as he was caught on a hot mic calling Senator Marshall a "moron".
This is not the first Bill named after the doctor with the previous one filed by another Republican, Senator Joni Ernst in March 2021. The Bill called Fairness and Accountability in Underwriting Chinese Institutions Act sought to block US funding of gain-of-function research into viruses in China.
The motion came in the light of a discovery that the US government funded one such research into coronaviruses, which had been carried out in the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan. Before 2019, coronaviruses primarily infected animals. However, it is feared that the gain-of-function experiments on them might have made humans viable hosts for them.