US Republicans question legality of NIH grant awards

In a complicated partisan attack apparently tied to Covid politics, US congressional Republicans are threatening tens of billions of dollars in research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, alleging that the money was spent by NIH officials who were not properly appointed.

In what they are calling a responsible act of legislative oversight, several House members said they had conducted a detailed review that found at least 14 NIH officials “were not properly reappointed to their positions” in December 2021, casting legal doubt on more than $25 billion (£19 billion) in NIH research grants awarded last year.

The Republicans, routinely critical of government bureaucracies as a tenet of their core ideology, gave no detailed reason for their extended concern about a potential procedural violation. Yet they noted that one of the 14 NIH officials was Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who became a political lightning rod for their party’s frustrations with the Covid pandemic.

The Republicans also did not say they would directly challenge the legality of the NIH grant awards, but they suggested that the evidence they accumulated might lead others to do so. Because the 14 staff appointments could be considered legally suspect, said one of the Republicans leading the effort, Morgan Griffith, “every programmatic decision, every policy decision and every grant award has question marks around it now”.

Federal law, Mr Griffith explained, required the US health and human services secretary – currently Xavier Becerra – to reappoint the heads of NIH divisions and not delegate that authority to someone else.

Biden administration officials ridiculed the complaint, which was put forth by members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has primary jurisdiction in the House of Representatives over biomedical research and development, including the NIH.

“The committee’s allegations are clearly politically motivated and lack merit,” said a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services (HHS) department, where the NIH sits organisationally.

The Energy and Commerce report, according to the HHS spokesperson, lists five cases in the Trump administration where NIH administrators were appointed under the same process the Republicans now criticise.

Mr Griffith and his colleagues offered no objection to any particular NIH grant – with one exception: their enduring focus on Professor Fauci and questions about his support for research in China ahead of the pandemic that involved coronaviruses.

The House committee report put singular emphasis on a $650,000 NIH grant, which it attributes to Professor Fauci, to the US organisation the EcoHealth Alliance to study possible future coronavirus emergence in south-east Asia. Conservatives have denounced the grant as indicating US government support for the understanding that Covid arose naturally in animals, as opposed to their belief that the Chinese government was behind it.

Mr Griffith, chair of Energy and Commerce’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations, speculated openly about multiple legal challenges of that grant and others issued last year by the NIH. “I suspect the American taxpayer is going to pay millions of dollars defending lawsuits from various groups and various organisations that think they’ve either done wrong or didn’t like the policies that came out during that time period,” he said.

After leaving the NIH, Professor Fauci last month took a position as a professor of medicine at Georgetown University.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com