The Biden Cancer Initiative’s mission was helping cure cancer. It failed in that endeavor, sadly enough, but smashingly succeeded in another. It paid its top officers a big pile of money.
About 65 percent of the nonprofit’s income went to salaries for employees, the New York Post has revealed, including two alumni of the Obama-Biden regime. Not a penny went to grants to fight cancer.
And after lining the pockets of its employees for two years, it closed when “President-elect” Joe Biden announced his run for the White House.
No Money for Grants
Biden began the initiative in 2017, two years after his son, Beau, died of brain cancer.
BCI described its mission this way, reported Guidestar, which monitors nonprofits:
The Biden Cancer Initiative will develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research, and care, and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes.
The Guidestar report also says that BCI “met with leaders and organizations from across the cancer research, patient, and advocacy community to better understand the prominent issues, identify examples of success in breaking down barriers and improving research systems, and validated the organization method for affecting change.”
As well, the report says, BCI “spoke at leading conferences and convenings about the goals and programs of the initiative to get the community buy-in on our mission and collaboration on ideas to achieve our goals.”
Launched the #CancerFierce Initiative to collect stories from cancer patients, survivors, caretakers, care providers, researchers, and others and to engage in a dialogue with the cancer community about how to collaborate to make progress.
Unhappily, BCI didn’t quite live up to the hype.
It “gave out no money to research, and spent most of its contributions on staff salaries, federal filings show,” the Post reported.
Big Bucks for the Top Officers
The so-called charity raked in $4.8 million through fiscal 2017 and 2018, the tax filing shows, and funneled almost $3.1 million, some 63 percent, to employees.
Its president, former Obama health advisor Gregory Simon, made off with $429,850 in 2018. Simon must have been a stellar employee. That figure almost doubled his salary in 2017: $224,539.
Simon, the Post noted, is a healthcare lobbyist who’s been moving from politics to private industry and back for years. He was executive director of the Obama administration’s Cancer Moonshot Task Force.
Another invaluable employee was Danielle Carnival, BCI’s vice president. But she only earned $258,207 in 2018. She, too, is a former factotum for Obama, having served as chief of staff for the Cancer Moonshot Task Force.
Three others earned $539,460 in 2018, the tax document shows
Despite the big bucks these five earned, the Biden Cancer Initiative apparently exploded on the launch pad.
BC Tax Doc 2018 BC Tax Doc 2017The 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 nonprofit spent $742,953 on conferences, tax filings show.
But under grants distributed, it listed zero.
Simon had said the main point of the charity was not to give out grants, and that its goal was to find ways to accelerate treatment for all, regardless of their economic or cultural backgrounds.
Whether it actually found any “ways to accelerate treatment for all” is unclear, although one could probably guess that BCI did nothing of substance.
“We tried to power through but it became increasingly difficult to get the traction we needed to complete our mission,” Simon told The Associated Press in July 2019.
AP also reported something else when the foundation “suspended” operations: “Simon also acknowledged that several of the program’s partnerships were ‘not successful,’ though he did not specify which ones had not worked out.”
“Not successful” is one way to put it.
A total bust is another.
