Joe Biden’s Cancer Charity Spent Millions On Salaries, Little On Cancer Eradication Efforts: Report

 

A cancer charity established by Democrat Joe Biden spent millions of dollars paying for the salaries of its employees, yet spent little on its efforts to eradicate the disease.

“The Biden Cancer Initiative 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. But it gave out no grants in its first two years, and spent millions on the salaries of former Washington DC aides it hired,” the New York Post reported. “The 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 head of the organization, Gregory Simon, a former Pfizer executive who worked in the Obama administration, made nearly $430,000 in 2018, according to tax filings obtained by the New York Post. That number is nearly double what he earned in 2017.

“Danielle Carnival, former chief of staff for Obama’s cancer initiative, the Cancer Moonshot Task Force, who took home $258,207 in 2018,” the report added. “The charity spent $56,738 on conferences and $59,356 on travel that year. The following year, the travel expenditure swelled to $97,149, and the non-profit spent $742,953 on conferences, tax filings show.”

The report noted that the organization listed that it did not spend anything under grants distributed, claiming that the point of the charity was not to give out grant money, but to find ways to accelerate treatment for all.

A separate report from The Washington Free Beacon noted that the amount of money Biden’s charity spent on salaries was significantly higher than what watchdog groups recommend.

The Free Beacon reported:

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 its president, Greg Simon, who pocketed $224,539 in 2017 and $429,850 in 2018. Charity Navigator’s primary criterion for rating charities is whether they “spend at least 75% of their expenses directly on their programs.”

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.

Biden, who has spent more than four decades as an elected official, promised Americans last year that if elected president, “we’re going to cure cancer.”