The Biden administration is not known to run as a well-oiled machine, and a new letter from Capitol Hill to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra highlights how its inability to accomplish even the basic functions of government as required by law likely put $25 billion worth of taxpayer-funded grants in legal jeopardy.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) — along with Health Subcommittee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY) and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Morgan Griffith (R-VA) — wrote to Becerra raising "serious concerns" about his failure to "follow the law and ensure accountability for billions of dollars in taxpayer funding at the National Institute of Health (NIH)."
Evidently, Becerra and the Biden HHS "did not reappoint a number of Institute and Center (IC) Directors at the NIH" including Dr. Anthony Fauci and more than one dozen others, a failure that "could have grave implications for the validity of actions taken by 14 NIH IC Directors during their unlawful tenure."
Those directors' terms ended on December 12, 2021 but, despite being required to by a provision in the 21st Century Cares Act, Becerra did not appoint or reappoint the NIH IC Directors on December 13, 2021.
🚨 We have uncovered that @SecBecerra failed to follow the Constitution and the law to reappoint top NIH officials when their terms expired in December 2021.
— CathyMcMorrisRodgers (@cathymcmorris) July 9, 2023
As a result, 14 NIH officials held unlawful positions and exercised authority they didn’t have.
Making matters even worse, the letter notes how "HHS and the NIH repeatedly assured the Committee that the NIH IC Directors were validly reappointed but did not produce proper supporting documentation." That is, it seems like the Biden administration officials misled Congress about the agency not doing its duties as required by law.
As the Energy and Commerce Committee continued its investigation, they turned up or received information that showed "the NIH handled the reappointments as an internal matter, signed by an NIH human resources director, whose name was redacted by HHS. Only after multiple investigative letters and extensive discussion with the Committee did you apparently attempt to reappoint these NIH IC Directors in a series of signed appointment affidavits issued on June 8, and 15, 2023, some eighteen months after their terms expired," the letter to Becerra emphasized.
According to the committee, the Biden administration's "failure to reappoint the above NIH IC Directors jeopardizes the legal validity of more than $25 billion in federal biomedical research grants made in 2022 alone." Not exactly a rounding error.
🚨 BREAKING: @SecBecerra FAILED to follow the Constitution and the law to reappoint 14 top NIH officials—including Dr. Fauci—when their terms expired in Dec 2021.
— Energy and Commerce Committee (@HouseCommerce) July 9, 2023
These officials held unlawful positions & used authority they didn’t have—including approving $26 BILLION in grants.
Despite the fact that HHS and Becerra apparently scrambled to reappoint the directors more than one year after their appointments expired, the Energy and Commerce Committee noted those long-overdue reappointments do not "retroactively ratify the decisions that NIH IC Directors made while not lawfully appointed" between December 2021 and June 2023. "A recent U.S. Court of Appeals decision also suggests that actions taken by NIH IC Directors while they were not lawfully appointed are legally invalid," the letter added.
As mentioned earlier, Dr. Fauci was among those who served for months without lawful valid authority, raising even more questions given his role in the Biden administration and its response to COVID-19. As the letter explained:
HHS has produced no documentation showing that Dr. Fauci and Dr.Glass were reappointed as NIAID Director and Fogarty International Center Director, respectively. Both retired prior to the issuance of the June 2023 appointment affidavits. Given his central role in the COVID-19 response, the Committee is particularly concerned about the failure to reappoint Dr. Fauci. Without reappointment, Dr. Fauci continued to serve as NIAID Director until his retirement on December 31, 2022. If Dr. Fauci was never reappointed, every action he took is potentially invalid.During that time, Dr. Fauci also served as President Biden’s Chief Medical Adviser. He regularly attended high-level meetings with Biden administration leadership and policy makers, including the National Security Council and the intelligence community. He was instrumental in crafting the administration’s response to the pandemic and was an outspoken advocate for intrusive public health mandates. Dr. Fauci, who remained the highest paid federal employee with an annual salary of $480,654, also made controversial decisions at NIAID during 2022. He awarded a new grant to EcoHealth Alliance despite unanswered concerns raised by us and others about possible EcoHealth double-billing USAID and NIH for the same research expenses and their failure to produce laboratory notebooks and other records from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That he could have amassed and exercised all of this authority and influence without being duly reappointed as NIAID Director demonstrates how ineffective HHS is at managing its component agencies and how little accountability currently exists.
The Energy and Commerce Committee's letter laid into Secretary Becerra for having "not complied with your oath to faithfully discharge the duties of your office. That HHS and the NIH spent 15 months obstructing the Committee to cover up your failure only makes matters worse," it added.
What's more, the committee said that it intends "to get a full accounting of who at HHS and the NIH decided to mislead the Committee and why" while noting the entities' "bad faith and failure to follow the law in this matter epitomizes why Americans no longer trust federal public health agencies."
"Not only did HHS and NIH ignore the law, it is also grossly unfair that Dr. Fauci –who unlawfully held his position after December 13, 2021 – could use his authority to push authoritarian mandates on the American people during the COVID-19 pandemic response," the letter reminds before concluding that "[g]reater accountability is needed."