Nobody Keeps the Books on This

I don’t have a dog in the Fauci fight. Here is the reflex thirty years in this work installs in you: when a client tells me a vendor is wasteful, my first question is never “are they right?” It’s “show me what the review cost.”

Not because the review is illegitimate — reviews are how anything gets managed — but because a review is itself a purchase. Purchases have prices, and prices are the only thing that keeps anybody honest about whether an activity is worth doing.

So when HSGAC held its hearing on Wednesday, I went looking for what the morning cost. Not to score a point. Because that’s what I do for a living, and because a committee dedicated to whether money is well spent ought to be the easiest place in Washington to find a number.

There is no number. There has never been a number. Nobody on either side of this has ever prepared one. That’s the story, and here is what it looks like on a page:

Read that COVID Subcommittee line again. A two-year investigation that produced 25 hearings, more than 30 transcribed interviews, and a 500-page report has no discoverable cost. Not a disputed cost. No cost. As a select subcommittee it never got its own budget line, so it was never booked as a distinct activity at all.

Committees are funded once a year as a lump sum from the Senate’s contingent fund (its general-purpose operating account), spent on vouchers the chairman approves. There’s no job costing — the practice of tagging every hour and dollar to a specific project so you can price it afterward. If a client handed me this and asked what one engagement cost, I’d tell them the system was never designed to answer the question.

What actually happened, stated flatly

Fauci was subpoenaed by chairman Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) after declining to appear voluntarily. In his opening statement he said he would invoke the Fifth “although it pains me to do so”, noted he had testified or briefed Congress more than 200 times across four decades, and called the chairman’s interest an “unhinged obsession with me.” Paul’s reply from the chair: “There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today.” He had Fauci’s attorney removed from the room for trying to speak. The ranking member, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), said the hearing was built toward “a pre-determined conclusion.”

Four days earlier Paul released 1,141 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era diary, plus a 465-page set of older records. STAT’s assessment of the contents: they “offer no proof that the pandemic originated from a lab or that Fauci or any other officials worked to cover it up.”

One detail matters for a piece about accounting. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his department spent “about eight months” pulling those records from “11 separate servers” before handing them over; Paul told reporters he used subpoena power; NPR reported it’s unclear which. I won’t pretend those reconcile. But under one of them, an executive-branch department ran an eight-month document project for a legislative committee — and that labor appears in no budget anywhere.

Where the record goes dark: who pays the lawyers

My honest instinct going in was that somebody other than the witness pays for the witness’s lawyers, and that the somebody is worth knowing. Let me be disciplined about what I can actually support — and let me mark my lane while I’m at it. I’m a CPA. I read budgets and appropriations for a living; I don’t practice law and I’m not offering a legal opinion here. Where a regulation comes up below, I’m quoting what it says on its face, not construing it.

Fauci is represented by David Schertler and Danny Onorato of Schertler Onorato Mead Sears & Manning. Paul noted he’d brought “a half-dozen” attorneys. Who pays those fees is not public. No legal defense fund, no Justice Department representation determination, no NIH or HHS payment record, no statement that he pays privately. It simply isn’t reported, and I’m not going to imply an answer I don’t have.

What is documented is the structure, and it’s more interesting than the speculation. DOJ maintains a standing budget line called “Private Counsel” whose stated purpose, in its own budget submission, is to pay private legal expenses “associated with the provision of testimony before Congressional committees.” It was $3,461,000 in FY2025 and $3,628,000 in FY2026. The authorizing regulation, 28 C.F.R. § 50.15, is titled in part “Representation of Federal officials and employees… in congressional proceedings,” and subsection (a)(7) states that a litigating division “may provide a private attorney to the employee at federal expense.” Those are the regulation’s words, not my reading of them.

To be explicit, because the juxtaposition invites a leap: there is no evidence Fauci or his attorneys drew on that appropriation. I raise it to show a funded federal mechanism exists and goes unreported in use — not to suggest it was used here.

For a documented figure on what one hearing costs a witness’s employer, look to the states. Minnesota moved $430,000 from a contingency account to pay outside counsel for the governor’s preparation for a single June 2025 House Oversight hearing. One hearing. One witness. Public money, disclosed only because a memo happened to reach a legislative commission.

Worth noting how rarely any of this gets asked: in 2023 Paul himself wrote to HHS asking whether Fauci still received “taxpayer-funded benefits… such as legal counsel and protective service.” Three years on, no public answer. A sitting chairman asked the right question and the ledger stayed closed.

Same story on the compliance side. I went looking for a GAO report, a Congressional Research Service product, an academic study — anything quantifying what oversight compliance costs the executive branch. It does not exist. The State Department reprogrammed $6.5 million to staff a unit answering Benghazi-era requests. The Pentagon described “millions of dollars and thousands of hours” without disclosing a figure. Fragments, never a system.

So who did get a measurable return?

Here I have to correct my own first instinct. I assumed the answer was “advertisers.” The filings say otherwise, and the real answer is worse.

Fox Corporation’s cable segment took in $4.316 billion in affiliate fees against $1.531 billion in advertising in fiscal 2025. Kagan estimates via Pew put Fox News’s 2022 profit at $1.78 billion, CNN’s at $892 million, MSNBC’s at $455 million.

Cable news is a carriage-fee business first, an advertising business second. Advertising is about a third of the top line. The rest arrives whether or not anyone watches.

The audience isn’t the customer. The audience is the collateral — what you point at to justify the per-subscriber fee every household on the bundle pays whether they tune in or not.

Which is why Wednesday’s coverage asymmetry isn’t a media-bias observation but an economic one. Using transcript-monitoring data, Mediaite counted mentions of Fauci across cable news in the 36 hours before the hearing: Fox News 343. CNN 10. MS NOW 1. One network decided the event was inventory; two decided it wasn’t. And it cuts both ways — in 2022 Fox declined to carry the January 6 hearings live while MSNBC drew the largest audience of any network. Each side carries what’s inventory for its audience. Both sides bill the whole bundle.

On why conflict specifically: examining 2.7 million posts from news organizations and members of Congress, Rathje, Van Bavel and van der Linden found posts about the political out-group were shared roughly twice as often, each out-group term raising share odds by 67% — an effect about 4.8 times stronger than negative sentiment generally. Not anger at an issue. Contempt for the other side.

I’ll be square about the limits. When researchers actually ran experiments — changing feeds for tens of thousands of users — they found no measurable movement in polarization over three months. And in the largest headline study, anger wasn’t statistically significant at all. “Outrage travels” is well supported. “Outrage causes polarization” isn’t proven, and I won’t say it is.

Meanwhile the bill for the electoral half arrives on schedule. AdImpact projects the 2026 midterm cycle at $11.6 billion. Trust in national news organizations sits at 56%, down 20 points since 2016. The product is selling well. The thing it’s supposed to produce is not being produced.

What this is, in the language I actually use

Strip the politics and this is the oldest problem in my field: an agency problem — what happens when the person making a decision isn’t the person bearing its cost. It has three legs.

• The decision-maker isn’t the payer. A chairman schedules. The contingent fund absorbs. The witness’s employer absorbs the document production. Households absorb the carriage fee. Nobody who chooses is the person who pays.
• There’s no cost object. In a way that’s worse than corruption, which at least implies somebody tracked the money. I can give you the annual authorization to the dollar and not the cost of a single day.
• The output has a commercial buyer who isn’t the principal. The taxpayer funds it. The programming monetizes it. The taxpayer is not the customer of the thing his money produced.

If a client ran a division this way — unbudgeted at the activity level, no measured output, a related party capturing the value — I wouldn’t call it a scandal. I’d call it a control deficiency, write it up, and expect it remediated before the next cycle. Nobody would argue with me. It’s just how you do the work.

And I want to be careful not to overshoot. Congressional oversight is legitimate and necessary. Some of the underlying questions are real: who funded what research overseas, under which definitions, with what biosafety review. Oversight also has deterrence value that appears in no ledger. I can’t measure that either, and I won’t pretend the benefit side is zero just because it’s unquantified.

But that cuts both ways, and it’s the real indictment. Neither side of this ledger has ever been measured. Not the cost, not the benefit. And an activity with no measured cost and no measured benefit will always drift toward whatever is measured — and what’s measured, precisely, by the minute, is audience.

That’s not a conspiracy. That’s just what happens to an unmanaged cost center when someone nearby is keeping careful books on attention.

The irony isn’t that the waste-fraud-and-abuse committee might be wasteful. It’s that it’s the one activity in Washington never subjected to the discipline it exists to impose. A witness said nothing for a morning, and the only party who can tell you exactly what that was worth is the network that sold it.

What I’d write in the management letter

Three findings, the same three I’d hand any client:

• Cost the activity. Publish per-investigation spending, including agency compliance hours, the way any project accounting system would require.
• Define the deliverable before spending. A written scope and a finding — not a hearing date.
• Disclose who pays for representation, on both sides. A federal appropriation for private counsel with no public reporting on its use is a disclosure gap by any standard I’d apply to a client.

None of that requires agreeing about Fauci. It requires treating oversight as a managed activity rather than a scheduled broadcast.

And if it reads like I’m unreasonably attached to knowing what things cost — guilty. It’s the same discipline I bring to a client’s books, and it’s usually the whole job: figure out what an activity actually costs, what it actually produces, and whether those two numbers justify each other. Most of the value I add isn’t finding a deduction. It’s making the invisible visible before somebody makes a decision on top of it.

The questions I got asked

Open any of these for the answer and the source.

Sources

Everything above is linked in place. Collected here so the record can be checked without hunting through the piece.

This piece is opinion and analysis by a certified public accountant. It is not tax, legal, accounting, or investment advice, and it is not a political endorsement of any candidate, party, or officeholder. Nothing here is a legal opinion or conclusion: where law or regulation appears, the text of the primary document is quoted and any interpretation is attributed to the reporters, officials, or counsel who offered it. Questions about the Fifth Amendment, pardons, contempt, or congressional procedure should go to a licensed attorney.

Every factual claim links to a primary document or a major outlet, and all sources are collected above. Where the public record is silent — most notably on who pays a congressional witness’s legal fees — that silence is stated as such rather than filled in. Two figures were deliberately not used: the widely repeated $7.8 million Benghazi total, which could not be sourced, and the $17.4 million January 6 figure, which traces to a single outlet’s own review of House disbursements.