Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.
Pay for federal officials varies a lot. For some, their salary is just the tip of the iceberg.
Civics 101 host Nick Capodice joins NHPR’s Michelle Liu to talk about how much government officials make, their taxpayer-funded salaries and other ways they get paid.
Transcript
So Nick, how much do government employees get paid?
Well, there are so many employees and their pay ranges are as wide as the Grand Canyon. So to answer your question, I'll start at the top. The highest paid government employees in the country are state college football coaches who make up to $15 million a year.
Wow.
Yeah, but I don't think that's what people want to know about today. So let's talk about federal employees. The president of the United States makes $400,000 a year. Supreme Court justices make $250,000 a year. Chief Justice Roberts makes a little bit more than them. And members of the House and Senate make $174,000 a year. But the highest paid federal employees are a handful of doctors who work for the National Institutes of Health and a much larger handful work at the Veterans Health Administration.
Were these salaries all paid during the government shutdown?
Yep, they were. All of the ones I've named so far were paid through one way or another.
So these salaries, they don't sound particularly massive. Are there other ways government officials make money?
There sure are. Lots of members of Congress have money to start with. That's one way. For example, here in New Hampshire, our two senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, each have an estimated net worth around $7 to $8 million. But with members of Congress, they have experience working with lobbying firms from their time in office. So once they leave office, they're in a position to work for those firms, earning exponentially more, making their congressional salary in a matter of weeks.
Former presidents make money, too. Hundreds of thousands through speaking engagements, book sales, etc. But there is a new twist in our current administration. The 2025 cabinet has a combined $14 billion in net worth, and Donald Trump is our first billionaire president. Now billionaires make their money by having a lot of money in the first place. But Donald Trump is an outlier here. CREW, which is a nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog organization, has tallied over 4,000 conflicts of interest regarding President Trump, from selling bibles to bitcoin. And most recently, the United Arab Emirates bought $2 billion of World Liberty Financial crypto, which is owned by the Trump family. Immediately after, the president agreed to give them access to AI computer chips.
So it sounds like the real big money in government isn't the salary.
It isn't. And what has happened is that this topic has led to discussions of whether government employees should just be paid significantly more to avoid these conflicts of interest. But the argument against that is that people really like having a lot of money. And who knows if a big salary is enough to stave off corruption.
