Billions of dollars in federal biomedical and public health research funding could be in jeopardy due to a technical failure from Secretary of Health of Human Services Xavier Becerra, according to a new report released by House Republicans on Friday.
A total of 14 directors of some of the largest of the National Institutes of Health’s 27 individual institutes and centers needed to be reappointed to their next five-year term by Becerra on Dec. 12, 2021, pursuant to both legislation and the appointments clause of the Constitution.
However, following a two-year investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, there is no evidence that Becerra signed the necessary paperwork by the December 2021 deadline to fulfill the legal requirements to legitimize the respective directors of the 14 institutes and centers.
“Secretary Becerra, an attorney by trade, failed to sign the basic legal documents and follow the process required by the Constitution and federal law necessary to reappoint key NIH officials, putting their jobs, the decisions they’ve made, and the billions in funding they’ve approved in legal jeopardy,” said Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Subcommittee on Health Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY), and Oversight and Investigations Chairman Morgan Griffith (R-VA).
The NIH is the leading federal agency responsible for conducting cutting-edge medical research and funding biomedical and public health research at universities across the country. As a whole, the NIH’s annual budget for 2024 was $47.1 billion.
Improper reappointments could expose the actions of the directors to substantial legal challenges, ranging from the administration of research funds to personnel changes or decisions.
Some of the largest individual branches of the NIH, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, are in jeopardy.
The committee began investigating whether Becerra had followed the proper protocol for NIH reappointments after journalistic reports in early 2022 noted the HHS secretary’s detachment from the NIH in the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a lack of announcement of the reappointments.
Only in June 2023 did Becerra sign affidavits for the reappointments of institute and center directors, more than a year after the committee began the initial inquiry in March 2022.
The report contends that HHS has provided the committee with as many as four different explanations of how the directors were reappointed and by whom, when the legal answer should be Becerra himself.
“That HHS has spent almost two years avoiding admission of its errors in this case reflects a lack of accountability apparent throughout the Biden-Harris administration,” says the report.
Neither the HHS secretary’s office nor the NIH director’s office responded to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
Prior to taking his post at HHS, Becerra served as California attorney general. Before that, he served in the House between 1993 and 2017, including time on the subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee.
However, critics were skeptical of Becerra’s qualifications when he was selected by President Joe Biden to head the federal Cabinet department with the largest annual budget outlays.
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House Republicans contend that the matter of reappointments is a grave constitutional concern as well as a technical challenge.
“The action to be taken was to fulfill the Constitutional duty and the statutory requirement to reappoint Inferior Officers of the United States,” says the press release on the report. “HHS’s lax approach toward this matter and its evasive, frequently misleading responses to this investigation reveals a lack of diligence in upholding the rule of law and our democratic values.”