Here's a simple test of who a politician is really working for. When a person worth many millions of dollars has the chance to take a little extra taxpayer money he doesn't need — does he take it, or leave it for the people who do?

Mike Rogers took it.

New reporting on his financial records shows that Rogers, the Republican running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, has been quietly collecting a taxpayer-funded pension from his old job in the Michigan Legislature — even as his personal fortune climbed into the eight figures, as much as $14.6 million. And he may soon be collecting a second taxpayer pension on top of it.

The pension he doesn't need

Rogers served in the Michigan state Senate from 1995 to 2000 before he went to Congress. That stint in Lansing earned him a state pension, which he became eligible to collect in 2018.

According to his personal financial disclosures, Rogers pulled in $125,600 from that Michigan Legislature pension between 2022 and 2025. If he's collected it every year since he became eligible, the total could be as high as $275,000. That's money coming straight out of the pockets of Michigan taxpayers and into the bank account of a multimillionaire.

And it may be about to get worse. In 2025, Rogers became eligible for a second taxpayer-funded pension — this one from his years in the U.S. House. As the Michigan Democratic Party put it, Rogers is now potentially "double dipping" from two public retirement checks at once. (Senate candidates aren't required to report federal retirement income, so the public can't even see how much that second pension is worth.)

Worth millions — and how he got there

The wealth is real, and it's big. Rogers' own 2025 federal financial disclosure reported that he and his wife hold assets worth between $6.7 million and $13.5 million, with no debt. Bridge Michigan, reviewing the same filing, put it at "at least $7 million, and perhaps more than $14 million." The $14.6 million figure comes from the Michigan Democratic Party's reading of those disclosures. However you count it, Rogers is a multimillionaire many times over.

What makes it striking is how fast it grew. PolitiFact found it "plausible that Rogers' net worth has increased by more than $14 million since he left office" in 2015 — through investments, property, and board seats. A year after leaving Congress, AT&T hired him as its "Chief Security Adviser," one of several roles he took in the industries he'd overseen as a congressman. (One place the money did not come from: PolitiFact rated a rival's claim that Rogers "took a $14 million payout as a pharma lobbyist" "Pants on Fire" — he never worked as a lobbyist.)

This is a man who has done extraordinarily well for himself. He does not need a pension check from Michigan taxpayers. He takes it anyway.

The hypocrisy

The double standard here is the whole story.

Rogers spent his campaign telling Michiganders that government has to tighten its belt — and then cheering on the exact cuts that hit working families hardest. The day Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" passed the House, Rogers celebrated its "historic tax cuts" as "a great day to be an American" — even though the same law slashed Medicaid coverage and put rural Michigan hospitals at risk of closing. In Congress he voted for the Ryan budget that would have turned Medicare into a voucher-style program, and he's said "every option" is on the table for Social Security — including partially privatizing it by letting workers invest their payroll taxes in the stock market.

So the retirement security that seniors earned over a lifetime of work? On the chopping block. The retirement check Rogers himself gets for six years in Lansing thirty years ago? He'll keep that, thanks.

Even some Republicans have called this kind of thing out. Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana argued that "it's time we make Washington more like the private sector and the best place to start is to end taxpayer-funded pensions" that lawmakers collect in retirement. That 2020 Forbes piece laid out the broader complaint plainly: "members of Congress shouldn't be able to double-dip in taxpayer-funded retirement plans." Rogers is the poster child for exactly what they were describing.

A pattern, not a one-off

If this were the only example, you might call it a technicality. It isn't. Rogers has a long record of using public office to benefit himself and the people around him:

• He was a lead author of CISPA, a cybersecurity data-sharing bill — at a time when his wife, Kristi Clemens Rogers, ran a "security" defense contractor that had helped secure a $10 billion State Department contract, exactly the kind of firm poised to gain from the ramped-up security spending such laws drive.
• He took at least $310,000 from pharmaceutical-industry groups and $162,000 from seven opioid distributors — companies that supplied 83% of Michigan's prescription opioids — all while pushing in Congress for greater access to opioids as the crisis devastated his state.

The taxpayer pension is small next to his multimillion-dollar fortune. But that's exactly why it's so telling. When a man this wealthy still reaches for money that isn't his to need, it tells you everything about whose interests he'll put first in the Senate — and it isn't yours.

Source

This post is based on reporting by American Journal News (photo: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File) and the underlying financial-disclosure analysis first released by the Michigan Democratic Party.