OPINION:
Public service has proved extraordinarily lucrative for many elected and appointed public figures. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former President Joseph R. Biden and his extended family, and former COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci come to mind.
For conservative talk-radio titan Dan Bongino, not so much. It will be quite the opposite.
As deputy director of the FBI, effective Monday, Mr. Bongino receives a financial haircut to match his signature crew cut.
As with many other 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.
Although that’s hardly chicken feed and, indeed, a salary that most Americans would be thrilled to receive, the conservative pundit’s job as deputy to FBI Director Kash Patel represents a significant pay cut.
That’s because Mr. Bongino is voluntarily giving 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 today. Both are eponymously named “The Dan Bongino Show.”
His final broadcast and podcast were on Friday.
He was replaced in the noon-to-3 p.m. Eastern Time Monday through Friday radio slot Monday by Vince Coglianese, who hosted an afternoon-drive talk show on Washington-based WMAL-FM. Mr. Coglianese occasionally filled in for Mr. Bongino.
Mr. Bongino departed from behind the radio microphone he inherited from Rush Limbaugh upon the talk-show legend’s death in February 2021 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,” launched in May 2021 with 115 stations, had 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, will presumably require Mr. Bongino to relocate back to the Washington area, from which he fled to Florida about a decade ago after unsuccessfully running for the House and Senate from Maryland in 2012 and 2014.
That relocation will be necessary if he is to use his FBI authority to help President 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 he will help fellow Trump appointee Mr. Patel to oversee.
According to CelebrityNetWorth.com, Mr. Bongino’s net worth is $150 million, most of it from 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 well-to-do $40 million.
Either way, Mr. Bongino, 50, his wife and two teenage daughters don’t have to worry about where their next meal will come from.
Not bad for someone who began his career as an officer with the New York City Police Department 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, Mr. Bongino received scant credit for his 16 years of law enforcement experience in liberal legacy news media reports when, on Feb. 23, Mr. Trump announced on his Truth Social platform his selection of the Queens, New York, native for the No. 2 post at the FBI.
The New York Times’ 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 F.B.I., President Donald Trump said on Sunday night.”
The report made no further reference to Mr. Bongino’s pre-punditry career in law enforcement or his service on the presidential protective detail, much less offered recognition for his personal and financial sacrifices in taking the FBI deputy director’s post.
Despite giving up a high-profile and equally lucrative broadcast-and-podcast operation, for which he had been finishing construction of new studios, Mr. Bongino would likely be the first to tell you something akin to “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”
It could be said that Mr. Bongino is instead taking to heart President Kennedy’s Jan. 20, 1961, inaugural address, which encouraged civic engagement and public service: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
• Peter Parisi is a former editor with The Washington Times.
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