Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has proposed a bill obliging federal employees to declare royalty profits from new technological advancements. The bill, the Royalty Transparency Act of 2024, passed unanimously in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday. “During COVID, we had vaccines that were developed by Pfizer and Moderna. And then these vaccines were mandated on people throughout government, throughout the military, by different governors around the country, and yet, we don’t know whether the people that were approving either the vaccines or the mandates were receiving money from big Pharma,” Paul said during an interview on Thursday.
If enacted, the legislation would require federal employees’ royalty earnings to be disclosed in an online database available for public viewing. Paul suggested that this measure would allow the public to identify any officials who approved drug treatments while receiving financial compensation from the drug manufacturers. Historically, federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have come under fire for refusing to disclose royalty payments to their researchers.
The bill follows a report from government watchdog group OpenTheBooks that found over 1,800 government scientists had collected over 27,000 royalty payments from 2009 to 2016, equating to hundreds of millions of dollars.
“So, it’s not a small amount of money,” Paul said. “It’s a significant amount of money … to scientists, and so some of them are getting million-dollar paydays from big pharmacy companies, and it’s not being disclosed to the public.”
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