Newt's WorldOpen the Books, a transparency organization, released a report revealing that the University of Virginia spends $20 million on 235 diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) employees, with some earning up to $587,340 per year. The report has sparked debate about the use of taxpayer money for DEI positions and programs. Open the Books' mission is to provide radical transparency so people can track government spending and hold politicians accountable for their decisions. The organization has captured nearly every dime taxed and spent at every level of government, federal, state, and local. Open the Books also revealed that elite universities have received about $45 billion in federal taxpayer subsidies since 2018. Newt’s guest is Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and Founder of Open the Books.
On this episode of Newsworld. On March fifth, Opened the Books released a report entitled University of Virginia spends twenty million dollars on two hundred and thirty five DEI employees, with some making five hundred and eighty seven thousand, three hundred and forty dollars per year. The report is just astonishing for a public university to be spending this much of the taxpayer's money on diversity, equity and inclusion positions and programs. Here to discuss the report, I'm really pleased to welcome back my guests, Adam and Jewski, CEO and founder of Opened the Books. Adam, welcome and thank you for joining me again on Newtsworld.
Well, mister speaker, it's great to be here. Thank you for your interest in our work. It's great to be back.
Well, before we dive into your March fifth report, could you spend just a couple minutes talking about Open the Books and what your mission is.
Our mission at Open the Books dot Com can be summarized in the phrase every dime online in real time. It's radical transparency so people can follow the money, so they can hold the political class accountable for tax and spend decisions and nuke for the first time in history. At openbooks dot com, we've captured nearly every dime taxed and spent at every level of government that's federal, state, and local. It took us fifty five thousand Freedom of Information Act requests last year and you can search it all for free on our website.
Where would people go for that?
So you go to open the books dot com. And we're pioneering right now on the website what we think is the most important innovation in American history on public policy. It's called Benjamin the Chatbot. It cost us seven million dollars to put together, and if you answer three easy questions you can write to your email box. The answer to your question on any public spending across the entire country, including the salary of your fifth grade teacher, will be delivered right to your email inbox.
That's amazing. How long have you been doing Open the Books?
So we launched Illinoi Centric and as you know, Ellinoi is the super Bowl of corruption. If anything on public policy and politics happens in Illinois for the good, it's entirely by accident. So it was a great training ground. We launched September of twenty eleven, for the first time ever, we put the pay and pensions of virtually every single Illinois public employee online. Then we realized we could do the entire country. We built the platform scalable, and that's what we've done.
The degree to what you're able to drill down when you look at your report on March fifth on the University of Virginia, you actually have each employee and the amount they're paid is amazing. Were you surprised by this?
We really were. Just to put our investigation in context. On the previous Friday, the University of Florida terminated their Diversity Equity and Inclusion their DEI spend and twenty eight employees were terminated. They lost their jobs, and the University of Florida said that this saved students and taxpayers five million dollars. So immediately at the flagship university right there in Virginia, founded by no less than Thomas Jefferson, we wanted to know what the situation looked like at the University of Virginia. It's one of the top five public universities ranked by US News and World Report in the country, and so what we found in our payroll database, and these numbers come right from the university. We captured them via Sunshine request from the university. We found two hundred and thirty five university employees, including eighty two students, most of which are on the equivalent of a full tuition waiver or a half or two thirty tuition waiver, working in the DEI departments and agencies at the school. And when we added up their salaries, quite frankly, we were stunned. It was fifteen million dollars. And that's not total student and taxpayer cost. You got to add thirty percent for benefits. You had a twenty million dollar annual spend in the DEI initiatives at the University of Virginia.
If you translate that today into undergraduate students, how many students total payments to the university would it take just to cover the DEI program.
It takes the tuition payments from nearly one thousand undergraduates just to pay the base salaries of the DEI staffers. Think about this. You've got seventeen thousand, five hundred undergraduate students at the university, and a thousand of them their full tuition payments are paying for the DEI employees.
If there are one hundred and eighty seven University of Virginia employees and students dedicated to quote, assist and monitor all parts of the university in their efforts to recruit and retain faculty, staff, and students from historically underrepresented groups, and to provide affirmative and supportive environments for work in life. That's what they say their mission is what do they actually do well?
That is the big question. They are embedded in every single aspect of the university, from employment decisions, undergraduate student enrollments. This is what they admit all the way into most likely what's taught in the classroom. For example, you had one of their top DEI staffers that she weighs in on issues of public policy in Appalachia for Crime out Loud, and she says that the early deaths in Appalachia are the result of the toch oxicity of whiteness.
The largely white people in Appalachia are dying because they're white.
If we had to go into what she means by that, she thinks that the privilege of being white in Appalachia is so toxic that the underlying problems of whiteness display themselves in Appalachia in a toxic culture. That's how I would summarize her position. Well, look at openbooks dot com. We linked to her underlying video. So if you come to our website and if you look at our breaking and launching story that we're talking about here about the two hundred and thirty five staffer is costing twenty million dollars at UVA. If you click on that, you can actually click through to the video where she talks about this.
This one center, they have an Equity Center, an Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, a Multicultural Student Services, an Office of Diversity Engagement, and a Center for Diversity in addition to thirty one people working in DEI roles and others departments, including the urology department. I'm trying to get my head around a DEI role in urology, but it's too embarrassing.
Ronald Reagan said. The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Well, nude, I think we need to upgrade it to the most terrifying thirteen words in the English language. I'm your DEI specialist from the Urology department and I'm here to help.
But now the university came back and said, you've exaggerated and they claim only fifty five staffers. What's the difference between your reporting and the university.
Yeah, let's talk about this because this is very important. The university is being disingenuous, they're misleading, and they're trying to confuse the issue. They're not being truthful about what their total spend is. So, for example, a little over a year ago, they're DEI specialist Kevin MacDonald, in response to a New York Times piece, said they had forty staffers dedicated to DEI. The university, in terms of a Board of visitors presentation about a month later, again a year ago, updated that number to fifty five. We took a look at again their payroll production, and we were able to parse two hundred and thirty five staffers for the total spend of twenty million including benefits. Here's the deal. We released our database and no one's called us. Nobody on that database has called us to say, oh, no, no, no, we're not a DEI staffer. We shouldn't be on your database. The university hasn't responded on a position by position account on that database. We released our information, which is basically a subset of their payroll information that they provided on production to our oversight teams. We've asked twice. We've asked Brian Cooy, the chief spokesman of the school, and others at the university for them to provide their database of the fifty five staffers. No response, So we filed the Freedom of Information Act request in Virginia for that database. We still haven't received it. Okay, here's the other deal. Ryan Coy, he's the spokesman. He used to be the spokesman for the Democratic Party of Virginia. He used to be the spokesman for Governor Terry mccauliffe and Ralph Northam. Okay, so since twenty nineteen he's been at the university. We took a look at his payroll history. In twenty nineteen, he was making one hundred and sixty two thousand dollars. Today he's making two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. They've given him a nearly sixty thousand dollars pay increase just since twenty nineteen.
They're complaining at one level, but I understanding correctly, there are some university of Virginia staffers that you didn't include that could arguably be included.
Well, that for sure. So you know, as an example of this, over at the Library Services Department, you have the lead on diversity equity inclusion. Well DEI is not in her title. We didn't put her in the database, but her official title is the librarian for Digital Life. She makes eighty thousand when you attack on the cost of benefits one hundred and four thousand. She's not in our database because she doesn't have DEI in the position title. However, she's the lead at the library for inclusion, diversity and equity accessibility at the library system. She's not in our data. She would only add to the costs.
I've obviously taught too many years ago, because you did not include in your report the ten professors in the Gender and Sexuality department. You know, years ago, the concept of a gender and sexuality department would have been a joke. It would have been a comedy novel or something. Is there actually a gender and sexuality department? Yeah?
There is, And you know there's professors that we didn't include in this report. You know, I think many people would find the teachings of these professors radical. So you've got an assistant professor of psychology in that women's gender and Sexuality department, and she makes one hundred and two thousand dollars a year in the spring course catalog at UVA. She may be teaching a class, but we can't find her name in the course catalog. I reached out to her for public comment to ask if she was teaching a class this semester. We received no response. She actually runs the research on intersectionality, sexuality and empowerment. It's called the Rise Lab at UVA. She speaks and writes about black female sexuality. She describes herself as a born certified sexologist, and she speaks online about her orgasms. And again it opened books dot com and the interest of transparency. If people want to check this out, they can click through to where she's speaks about these things. You can see it for yourself. These are your tax dollars at work.
Some of this could actually be pretty good for a TV show. She doesn't teach classes and she's a professor. Were you able to check out? Is there such a thing as a board certified sexologist?
You know, we've been so busy. I just took it at face value. Dude, it did strike me as strange. This is the first time, obviously, I've ever heard about it. I don't know if it's a self title or I don't know if at the state level in Virginia there's a board certified six coologists. Now nothing, you know. Look, I'm from Illinois, I'm green eye shaded, I'm cynical. Nothing would surprise me.
To go beyond the University Virginia. You also publish a report on US taxpayer subsidies to sort of the elite universities the IVY League plus Stanford in Northwestern, and you calculate that those federal taxpayer subsidies come to about forty five billion dollars since twenty eighteen. Can you walk us through the numbers of how you got there?
Yes, So he took the entire federal checkbook, spending contracts and grants into the eight schools of the Ivy League, including Harvard, Yale, and the schools you know about, and we added in Stanford and Northwestern. So you have ten elite universities and over the course of a five year period between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two, their receipt of tax payer money through federal agencies exceeded the amount of undergraduate student tuition they collected. So newt today these elite universities, even though they're mostly private institutions, these elite universities are more federal contractor than they are undergraduate student educator.
It's also why it's so hard to influence them, because the truth is they're financially independent of any kind of pressure other than the government.
And here's why they need to lighten the load any American taxpayer. We had collected thirty three billion dollars in this five year period of federal contracts and grants. They also received the benefit of twelve billion dollars of special tax breaks on their endowment and their investments. So that's forty five billion dollars in a five year period, basically funded in one way or another through taxpayers. Then we took a look at the growth of their massive endowments, and that five year period, their endowments alone collectively grew by sixty five billion dollars, which is a stunning number. Here's the play from our nation's elite universities on their operating budgets. They bill it off against taxpayers. Forty five billion dollars while they stuffed from the private sector through their donor networks, the growth of sixty five billion dollars on in their investment gains and their donations. We did the study that by twenty forty five, just the eight schools of the Ivy League will have a trillion dollar endowment. Basically all the money in the world. They have, all the donor connections in the world. They don't need taxpayer help. They should lighten the load of the American tax payer.
There's a fascinating study by Scott Rasmussen who found that if you looked at people who had graduated from one of these schools, who had an income of above one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and who lived in large cities, what he called the elite one percent, they are so radically different from everybody else in America that they really do form sort of a totally different world. He said. The most frightening single polling number he'd seen in the thirty five years he'd been polling. He asked, if you were going to lose an election, would you cheat in order to win? Seven percent of the country said yes. Sixty five percent of the elite. One percent said yes, and he cited a woman professor at Harvard who said, you know, I spent my whole life learning how to do the right things, and if only people would calm down and let us alone, we could make their lives much better. And it says the clearest statement of an oligarchy. That's sort of an intellectual oligarchy, but as you point out, it's now also a financial oligarchy. I mean, this isn't enormous concentration of money around a small number of extraordinarily well educated people who think they are superior to the rest of us.
That's stunning. It wasn't aware of that study, that's amazing. It goes right to what the Nobel laureate economist Frederick Hyatt outlined years ago, the fatal conceit of the elite they think they know better than the rest of us. It's incredible. And look, the nation got a front row seat to the thinking and the congressional hearing when at least Stefanik asked the three presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. There was a simple question, and they couldn't answer it, and it got two of them fired. Stephanics simply asked the presidents of these universities, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your rules on bullying and harassment? And they could not answer yes. None of the three presidents answered yes, and it got two of them fired. But it shows you the thinking and the rock at these universities.
Both Florida and Texas have now banned diversity, equity and inclusion in their public universities. Do you think that's something that other states should follow up on? Well?
I do. I do because it's the opposite of the American ideal of equal opportunity. When you say in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. That gives us the opportunity to make something of our lives and new look. I appreciate this. I'm the beneficiary of this. I grew up in a small town. My family was added near the federal poverty markers. From my entire upbringing, I'm the oldest of seven kids, and over the course of a fifteen year period, I was able to go from my small row of town to one of the most wealthiest communities in the country because I had the opportunity to make something of myself. So I take that very seriously. DEI is the opposite of that. The equity portion says there's equal outcomes. You move away from the merit based system and you move to an outcome based system. And that's the opposite. That's radical socialism, that's neo Marxism, and it needs to be fought.
One of the steps towards finding the twenty seventeen Tax Cuts and Jobs Act imposed attacks of one point four percent of investment income for university and down succeeding five hundred thousand dollars per student. Should this tax be higher? And if so, would you apply the twenty percent capital gains tax rate? Yeah?
Twenty three point five percent. That's what wealthy Americans pay on capital gains. And many people don't understand why these elite, super wealthy universities are only paying one point four percent now the precedent of the twenty seventeen tax hike on Congress, that was the direct result in the previous spring in twenty seventeen of our reporting at opened the books dot com on the taxpayer subsidy of the Ivy League that they're more federal contractor than they are educator, and they had amassed all this wealth, and they were knocking down all the taxpayer payments. The Boston Globe cited our work that year as the impetus for the Republican Congress to implement that tax signed by President Trump. But now it's a bipartisan issue. You even have the state legislature in Massachusetts wanting to slap a two point five excise tax on the endowments, for instance at Harvard. So you have state legislatures following up on this, and you have JD. Vance in the United States Senate. His legislation would hike the tax from one point four percent to thirty five percent capital gains tax on these institutions that have these massive endowments.
That would actually be in to bring in real money.
Well, in Massachusetts, it is real money. It would pay for free education for everybody in the state of Massachusetts in the university system. Now, obviously Harvard's pushing back aggressively on this. They are spending student tuition dollars tax payer dollars. Somebody in Congress needs to hold a hearing and put these university presidents, for instance at the Ivy League, in front of another hearing. Since two thousand and seven, according to disclosures. The eight schools of the Ivy League have spent twelve point five million dollars on lobbying. And you're not supposed to use taxpayer dollars to lobby. So what dollars are they using? Are they using student tuition dollars to lobby? Are they using donor dollars to lobby? They're set up as public charities five O one C three educational public charities. What dollars are they using to lobby at the local, state, and federal levels. I want to know, And those university presidents and a hearing under oath should tell us.
I think you raised a ton of fascinating issues. You've done really an extraordinary job of putting together this entire project, and it's grown up over a number of years. How old is Open the Books?
We launched in September of twenty eleven at Illinois Centric at opendbooks dot com. So look, we launched nationally with my opinion editorial at the Wall Street Journal. We took the entire federal checkbook in twenty thirteen. It was groundbreaking technology at the time, and we pushed it to your cell phone through a mobile app, and Wall Street Journal published my editorial. This was our national rollout in twenty thirteen. When the legendary Senator doctor Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, when he left the US Senate it was about twenty fifteen in the spring of twenty fifteen. He then joined openthbooks dot Com as our honorary chairman. I had the privilege to fight arm in arm with doctor Coburn for the next five years until he passed away right at the start of the pandemic in twenty twenty. He passed away from cancer, unfortunately much too early in life. Doctor Coburn and I fought these battles on transparency and accountability at openthbooks dot Com for that five year period.
So if you were the budget committee trying to figure out how to get to a balanced budget over the next decade, this would be one of the great source documents to go in and learn what's absurd and what could be easily cut with no normal taxpayer being affected, but the people who've been living off the land suddenly having a new challenge.
This is pretty incredible. In February of twenty twenty, we had convinced President Donald Trump to run the War on Waste to aggressively embrace the transparency revolution to audit every dime of federal grant making and contracts, and then communicate with the American people that three prong approach can be used by any government executive, whether you're heading up a county, a mayor of a city, whether you're a governor of a state. And we encourage that the President had adopted that into the fiscal year twenty twenty one budget. I got to break that budget. In my then comlement Forbes, it cited in reference to our organization by name in two sections of the report. Number one, they were committed to ending the corrupt practice at the federal level of use it or lose it spending when the agencies spend down their budget this year to get the same or more money from Congress next year, and they cited our work and hyperlink to our website in that section. They also use their findings on the National Endowment of the Arts and Humanities to suggest eliminating those agencies. We had found that eighty percent of their grant making went a well healed, rich arts organization, not the starving artist. So Newt your call there to use us as a resource spot on We had convinced Trump to run that. That was two weeks before the pandemic hit, and obviously all those plans were thrown out the window as the nation pivoted during the pandemic years.
I often do work with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is I think fifteen or sixteen hundred state legislators, and obviously every state legislature should be going to your website, Open the Books dot com and learning about the waste and the inappropriate spending in their own government.
In San Diego, at the American Legislative Exchange Council ALEC at their annual meeting, I was the lunchtime speaker. I actually followed Scott Rasmussen at that lunch You had great pole results to share with the group, and I made the point on the read the Bill legislation. This was a public policy campaign that we had run for two years. We put this in the Wall Street Journal. I talked frequently about it on c SPAN. We ran a grassroots petition that got tens of thousands of signatures. The campaign was so effective that when Kevin McCarthy became Speaker, he wrote it into the House Rules of seventy two hour timeout after the final piece of legislation to simply read the bill. Dude, I think it's a ninety nine percent issue with the American people, left right and center. AOC backs this proposal for crying out loud. But with the change in speakers, I think that rule went out the window because it was accompanied by the single subject legislation rule. And obviously we just last week had the omnibus spending bill with everything rolled into one was dropped down a Sunday, voted through Congress on both chambers by Friday, and so I think they've moved away from that rule. I think that rule got trashed when the change of speaker happened.
Well, sometimes new reforms are like sisiphus rolling the rock up the hill. You know, you roll it up, it comes back down. You roll it up, but it comes back down, and then every once in a while you actually get it to the top of the hill, and that's when you have a great historic moment. Adam, I think Open the Books dot Com and I've always felt this way from the time I first ran into it is an amazing project that represents a real investment in citizenship. I want to thank you for joining me, for helping us understand with clarity where all this money at major universes is being spent. And I want to remind our listeners they can learn more about the work you're doing at openthbooks dot com. Thank you very much, Adam for being with me.
Newt, Thank you very much. Thank you for being a champion of transparency and accountability.
Thank you to my guests, Adam Angievsky. You can learn more about Open the Books on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Gangwi three sixty Aniheartmedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at ginglesthree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Nutsworld
