For too long, the bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been lining their pockets through clandestine agreements with big corporations, getting cozy with the very entities they’re tasked with overseeing.
Trust in our public institutions is already low, but this arrangement is among the most egregious found today—it represents an epidemic of corruption. Shockingly, over 55,000 royalty payments have been overlooked in the past decade alone. Each undisclosed royalty payment is a potential conflict of interest, undermining the credibility of our institutions and eroding the trust of the American people.
Explosive revelations by OpenTheBooks in 2023 shed light on this cycle of cronyism. It was uncovered that more than 2,400 NIH scientists pocketed a whopping $325 million in royalty payments in the last decade, with an average of $135,000 per person. Yet the details of these sweetheart deals remain hidden in the shadows, and vital information has been redacted from public view despite attempts to uncover them through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Disregarding attempts to bring these payment details to light, the NIH has stubbornly withheld essential information, including the amounts of individual payments and the identities of the payers.
Even when pressed at Senate hearings, figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci dance around the subject. This lack of transparency is not a new issue—even Dr. Fauci himself once admitted the potential conflicts of interest these royalty payments could introduce.
Back in 2005, Dr. Fauci himself openly recognized the inherent conflict of interest in these royalty payments creates when the NIH spent $36 million to test the interleukin-2 experimental AIDS drug—a drug he and Dr. Clifford Lane invented. The irony of him championing transparency back then, only to bury financial dealings two decades later, is striking.
I joined my Republican colleagues on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on a letter to Acting Director of the NIH, Lawrence Tabak, in June of 2022, seeking answers on royalty payments at NIH. But unsurprisingly, NIH is stonewalling, claiming they are above such disclosures. It’s this kind of arrogance that fuels distrust and raises legitimate concerns about whose interest our government agencies are truly serving.
The implications of these undisclosed payments extend far beyond simple bureaucratic secrecy. They cast a long shadow over the impartiality of our regulatory processes, especially against the backdrop of reports like the New York Post’s 2023 report, which detailed Moderna greasing the skids with $400 million in royalty payments to the NIH. Dartmouth and Scripps Universities similarly used government-funded research to develop a spike-protein technique used in its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, and then received royalties for research funded by the government. Some call this “socializing the cost” and “privatizing the profit.”
The NIH employees’ potential profit from future royalties on Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is the icing on this conflict-of-interest cake, and examples like this should make every outside observer question how to the Executive Branch maintains impartiality in the regulatory process. This isn’t limited to matters of financial transparency, but goes to the very heart of how public health decisions are made, and whether the potential for financial gain is interfering with objective decision-making in pursuit of the American people’s best interests.
A lack of transparency surrounding financial transactions within public health policy is alarming, and further stonewalling is unacceptable. The American people deserve to know who is paying whom, how much is being paid, and for what benefit.
To address these issues, I introduced the Royalty Transparency Act. This bill cuts through Executive Branch secrecy by mandating employees disclose any royalty payments received for government-developed inventions. It also requires agencies to publish these financial disclosures online, bypassing the current bureaucratic maze that inhibits public access to information, while providing additional oversight to prevent conflicts of interest. Moreover, my bill compels applicants for federal grants and contracts to disclose royalty payments made to the government over the past decade.
Transparency is the crux of the matter. It is the foundation of a functioning republic, and bureaucrats’ royalty payments should be no exception. It is time to lift the veil of secrecy and hold government agencies, and their employees, accountable. Only through transparency can we begin rebuilding trust and ensure our institutions serve the public interest, not the interests of big corporations and federal bureaucrats.
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