For many elected and appointed public figures, public service has proved to be extraordinarily lucrative. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former President Joe Biden and his extended family, and former COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci come to mind in that regard.
For conservative talk radio titan Dan Bongino, not so much. In fact, it will be quite the opposite.
In taking the job of deputy director of the FBI, effective Monday, Bongino is taking a financial haircut to match his signature crew cut.
As with many top leadership posts in the Senior Executive Service, the FBI deputy director’s post doesn’t have a fixed salary structure. Instead, it falls within a defined pay band ranging from $144,000 to $201,000 annually.
While that’s hardly chicken feed and, indeed, it’s a salary that most Americans would be thrilled to receive, taking the job as the deputy to FBI Director Kash Patel represents a significant pay cut for the conservative pundit.
That’s because Bongino gave up a nationally syndicated radio talk show heard on more than 350 stations as well as one of the most listened-to podcasts in the world. Both were eponymously named “The Dan Bongino Show.”
His final broadcast and podcast aired on Friday.
He was replaced in the noon-to-3 p.m. Eastern Time Monday through Friday radio slot on Monday by Vince Coglianese, before now the host of an afternoon-drive talk show on Washington, D.C.-based WMAL-FM. Coglianese had occasionally filled in for Bongino.
Bongino’s departure from behind the radio microphone he inherited from talk show legend Rush Limbaugh upon the latter’s death in February 2021 came less than 16 months after signing a lucrative contract extension with Cumulus Media’s Westwood One division.
In announcing the multiyear deal on Dec. 6, 2023, Westwood One noted that “The Dan Bongino Show” had launched in May 2021 with 115 stations and had subsequently grown to 356 and was airing in nine of the top 10 media markets.
“The Dan Bongino Show” on the Cumulus Podcast Network, which aired in the hour immediately preceding the radio show, “is a perennial Top Ten in Apple’s News category ranking” and had “seen well over 200 million downloads” at that point in 2023, according to Westwood One. It added that “the show has been downloaded more than 350 million times on Rumble and was one of the most requested podcasts on Alexa devices this year.”
Another personal sacrifice, albeit of a different sort, presumably required Bongino to relocate back to the Washington, D.C.-area, from which he fled to Florida about a decade ago after making unsuccessful bids for the U.S. House and Senate from Maryland in 2012 and 2014.
But that relocation would be necessary if he is to use his FBI authority to help President Donald Trump drain the Washington swamp and put a much-needed end to the corrupt weaponization of the justice system—including that of the very agency that he is now helping fellow Trump appointee Patel to oversee.
According to CelebrityNetWorth.com, Bongino’s net worth is $150 million, most of it in the form of his large financial stake in Rumble, a video platform favored by conservatives as an alternative to YouTube. Another source estimated his net worth at a much lower, but still very well-to-do $40 million.
Either way, needless to say, Bongino, 50, and his wife and two teenage daughters don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
Not bad for someone who began his career as an officer with the New York City Police Department 30 years ago in 1995. Little did he know when he took a position four years later with the Secret Service, where he served from 1999 to 2011, that he would wind up on the protective detail of two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Yet Bongino received scant credit for his 16 years of law enforcement experience in liberal legacy news media reports when, on Feb. 23, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform his selection of the Queens, N.Y., native as his choice for the No. 2 post at the FBI.
For example, The New York Times’ Feb. 23 account of the appointment led with: “Dan Bongino, a former New York City police officer and Secret Service agent turned right-wing pundit and podcaster, will be the next deputy director of the FBI, President Donald Trump said on Sunday night.”
But the report made no further reference to Bongino’s pre-punditry career in law enforcement and no mention at all of his service on the presidential protective detail, much less offer recognition for the personal and financial sacrifices he’s making in taking the FBI deputy director’s post.
Yet, despite giving up a high-profile and equally highly lucrative broadcast and podcast operation—for which he had been finishing construction of new studios at the time of his appointment—Bongino would likely be the first to tell you something akin to “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”
It fairly could be said that Bongino is instead heeding President John F. Kennedy’s Jan. 20, 1961, inaugural address entreaty to civic engagement and public service: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
Originally published by The Washington Times
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