A growing controversy involving top officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) apparently trying to hide public records could give Republicans an opportunity to reform the agency and potentially reduce its budget if they gain control of the government in November.
Emails discovered as part of the Select Subcommittee’s Coronavirus investigation have placed the $49 billion agency under rare bipartisan scrutiny, and outside groups are struggling to rally their supporters.
The NIH is the world’s leading biomedical research grant agency and has historically enjoyed bipartisan support from Congress.
But the COVID-19 pandemic changed that, as Republicans grew outraged over efforts to stop the spread of the virus. They argued that the agency, and former White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci in particular, had become irresponsible.
Those arguments have been growing louder throughout the GOP-led coronavirus investigation and will likely take center stage when Fauci testifies publicly before Congress on Monday for the first time since retiring.
Lawmakers say the growing investigation into the origins of the virus has revealed efforts to hide official government correspondence, evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and avoid public scrutiny.
In a May 28 letter to NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli, subcommittee chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said the evidence “suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to prevent transparency public in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
House Republicans this week released a series of private emails that suggest at least some agency officials, including a top Fauci adviser, deleted messages and used personal emails to skirt public records laws.
David Morens, a former Fauci aide and career scientist at NIH, testified last week that he may have sent information about government business to Fauci’s personal email address.
“I can send things to Tony on his private Gmail or give them to him at work… He is too smart to allow colleagues to send him things that might cause problems,” Morens wrote in a 2021 email released by the committee.
“I learned from our [FOIA] Madam, here is how to make the emails disappear after I get rejected but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a separate email. “Also, I deleted most of the previous emails after sending them to Gmail.”
Some conservatives, including allies of former President Trump, think the NIH is a bloated bureaucracy that serves as a shield for irresponsible government officials. And they say the emails from Morens, as well as Fauci’s former chief of staff Greg Folkers, are further proof of that.
Wenstrup told the Hill that the subcommittee is considering referring Morens to the Justice Department to face criminal charges for deliberately evading government open records policies. But although he said the NIH should be scrutinized, he suggested that accountability should come from within.
“I hope the new leadership takes responsibility. You know, suffice to say we want to clear the record here and we want people to have more confidence in public health. And we will investigate ourselves,” Wenstrup said. “I hope they do that or appoint an inspector general to investigate the events, the procedures that have occurred within their agency over the years.”
Still, outside conservative groups that could influence the next Republican administration consider the agency ripe for change.
“This will be the source, I think, of very serious attempts at reform and restructuring of the NIH,” said Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “It is absolutely clear that Congress must review the NIH and the way it operates.”
Project 2025, a comprehensive presidential transition plan for a potential second Trump presidency led by Heritage officials, suggests making it easier to fire top agency officials as a way to gut bureaucracy and hold them more accountable.
Brian Blase, a former member of the Trump administration’s National Economic Council and president of the Paragon Health Institute, said “everything should be on the table” in terms of changes at the agency.
“It is obvious that the public health system acted deceitfully and needs reform. And everything must be on the table, including significant reorganizations and changes in the level of funding to ensure that public health agencies truly promote the health and well-being of the public,” Blase said in an email.
Moffit said he wouldn’t go so far as to suggest cutting funding.
“We’re talking about biomedical research…obviously, no one wants to do anything that would harm our research capabilities,” Moffit said. “You know, just attacking, the United States cannot allow that.”
But the NIH already faces strong odds of seeing a significant increase in funding in the current budget environment.
“The hard lids that are tightening [the Department of Defense] they are squeezing the NIH,” said Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) at a recent hearing on the NIH’s fiscal 2025 budget request. “They are threatening to slow or derail advances that patients and their families are desperately counting on.”
House Republicans have proposed cutting 8 percent from the agency’s budget in fiscal year 2024, although the administration’s final funding bill would essentially keep NIH funding flat.
Ellie Dehoney, senior vice president of Research!America, a research advocacy organization, said she believes NIH’s allies in Congress will not allow the agency’s budget to be cut, even if Republicans want to “punish” the agency’s employees. .
Congressional supporters “definitely agree that accountability and transparency and those kinds of things will be in this. But I don’t think that’s going to result in funding, and it’s part of our role as advocates to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Dehoney said.
“We will have to be vigilant to ensure that any proposed changes to the NIH, statutorily or administratively, do not compromise the NIH’s role in serving the public good. And it’s actually possible that some of these things will be proposed,” Dehoney said.
“But I think … both Republican and Democratic administrations have no interest, at the end of the day, in slowing down medical progress.”
Joseph Choi contributed reporting
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
