The Paycheck Did Not Stop When the Campaign Started

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Abdul El-Sayed resigned as Wayne County’s health director on April 3, 2025, and announced for the Senate. Twenty days later the same department hired him back. Not as director. As a consultant. Nine thousand dollars a month, thirty hours, three hundred dollars an hour, paid by the taxpayers of the county he had just left, while he was out asking those same taxpayers for a six-year term in Washington.

That was the first gig. There was a second. Together they are the cleanest picture yet of who has been writing checks to Michigan’s Democratic nominee while he campaigns as the man who cannot be bought.

The county contract

The health department approved the deal on April 23, 2025, six days after he declared. It ran through the end of the year. The cap was $72,000 for eight months. The work, on paper, was strategic support for a smooth leadership transition, operational priorities, data strategy, executive help, and communications. The checks did not go to El-Sayed. They went to AME Higher LLC, a company he set up as the pass-through for consulting and speaking fees.

His latest financial disclosure, covering 2025 and the first seven months of 2026, lists the full $72,000 from the county. A county spokesman said the contract ended December 23, 2025. He is not still on that monthly draft. He was on it for the first eight months of a Senate campaign.

The county executive who presides over that department is a Democrat, Warren Evans. Transition contracts for departing officials are not unknown. A transition contract signed six days after a Senate announcement, at three hundred dollars an hour, routed through a personal company, is a choice. The public was told he had resigned. The invoices say the resignation came with a retainer.

The same disclosure shows what he did with the company. He paid himself a salary of $64,000 and took an additional $103,000 as a member draw. Draws from that kind of company are not taxed as ordinary wages. Accountants call it ordinary planning. A candidate who campaigns against loopholes for the rich will have to explain why his own paycheck took the side door.

The second client

The county was not the only one paying.

Since no earlier than July 2025, three months after he launched, El-Sayed has collected more than $82,000 in consulting fees from One Health Partners, a Chicago-area health outfit owned by an Illinois businessman named Ali Karim. The candidate’s disclosure describes the work as supporting patients with limited access to care. Former employees of the outfit have called it a scam, built on buying medical practices and working the Medicare billing to raise the take.

Karim also gave El-Sayed’s campaign $7,000, the legal maximum.

The candidate has a speech about this exact business. He has attacked firms that buy doctors’ offices and jack up the revenue, including by overbilling Medicare. He gave that speech while cashing the checks. The first disclosure he filed, covering January 2024 through June 2025, does not list the Chicago income. The later one does. The work and the campaign overlapped. The donation and the invoice have the same name at the top.

Who is buying what

Two payers, two motives, neither of them a mystery.

The county deal is the machine taking care of its own. El-Sayed ran the health department for two years. He left to run for the Senate on the strength of that title. The executive who benefited from the title kept him on the county dime for the opening months of the race, at a rate a practicing physician would notice. That is not a bribe in the statute-book sense. It is a public subsidy for a candidacy, dressed as advice on a transition the candidate had just created by quitting. Taxpayers in Detroit and Dearborn funded the early payroll of a man who wants their vote in November.

The Chicago deal is the sharper of the two. A man whose company buys practices and whose former staff describe Medicare as the profit center has paid the would-be senator more than eighty thousand dollars and maxed out to his campaign. If El-Sayed reaches Washington, Medicare payment rules, clinic ownership, and the policing of billing will sit in the committees he would join or the agencies he would oversee. A consultant does not forget the client who paid him during the campaign. A client does not forget the consultant who becomes a senator.

Nothing in the filings shows a written promise of a vote. Nothing has to. The county bought continuity and a friendly name on the letterhead. The health outfit bought a relationship with a man one election away from writing the rules of its business. He has attacked that business in public and invoiced it in private.

What the race is paying for

Michigan’s Senate contest is already past $205 million in disclosed spending, with another $65 million in advertising reserved through Election Day. Outside groups aligned with the Democratic leadership have put tens of millions behind El-Sayed since he won the primary. The consulting money is small beside that. It is also the only money with his name on the invoice rather than the campaign’s.

He is running as the candidate the billionaires cannot purchase. The paper says the county purchased eight months of his time with public funds, and a Chicago health operator purchased a year of it with private funds and a maximum check. The first ended in December. The second is the one to watch if he wins. A senator who spent the campaign on that payroll will have a very short answer the first time a billing rule comes up, or he will have a very long one. Michigan voters have thirty-two days to decide which answer they are buying.