McMorris Rodgers alleges Fauci and other NIH officials served unlawfully, casting doubt on billions in grants

Jul. 15—WASHINGTON — The Spokane Republican who leads the House Energy and Commerce Committee alleged last week that former White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci and other officials at the National Institutes of Health served unlawfully, casting doubt on the legality of policy decisions and billions in federal grants.

In a July 7 letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and other members of the committee she chairs wrote that an investigation by the panel's GOP members found that Fauci and 13 other NIH directors had not been properly reappointed after their terms expired in December 2021. That jeopardized more than $25 billion in federal grants for medical research, the Republicans said.

"Secretary Becerra has failed to follow the Constitution and the law," McMorris Rodgers said during a news conference Tuesday. "There's been a complete breakdown of accountability at the agency that has lost the trust of the American people, especially during COVID-19."

Becerra didn't reappoint the officials until June, according to the GOP letter, and didn't include Fauci and another official who had by then resigned.

In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services said the committee's allegations "lack merit" and the department "stands by the legitimacy" of the reappointments.

As chair of the committee, McMorris Rodgers has jurisdiction over biomedical research, among many other issues. Since before Republicans gained the House majority in January, she has focused the panel's oversight resources largely on the origins of the pandemic.

During Tuesday's news conference, she called attention to a grant made under Fauci's leadership to EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to researching infectious diseases whose ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — in the Chinese city where COVID-19 was first identified — have drawn scrutiny from advocates for stricter lab safety measures.

After the NIH suspended grant funding for EcoHealth Alliance in 2020, citing its connection to the Wuhan lab, the agency restarted more limited support in May. That came after the HHS Office of Inspector General released a report in January that faulted the department's oversight of grants to EcoHealth Alliance.

"This is unprecedented and it calls into question the validity of every decision that these officials have made since December 2021 to June 2023, including Dr. Fauci's awarding a new grant to EcoHealth Alliance," McMorris Rodgers said Tuesday. "But what is even more egregious is Health and Human Services' cover-up."

That cover-up, the GOP lawmakers allege, involved a series of misleading statements by the department in response to questions from the committee's Republicans.

According to the letter to Becerra, the NIH told the panel in April 2022 that Acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak had reappointed all of the officials, but the department had not provided documents proving the appointments had occurred. The Republicans say a 2016 law requires the HHS secretary, Becerra, to make those appointments, not the NIH director.

The department eventually sent the committee appointment affidavits signed by Becerra, dated June 8 and June 15, but the Republicans say those documents don't apply retroactively — and don't apply at all to Fauci or the other official who had already resigned, Fogarty International Center Director Roger Glass.

The department has yet to respond in detail to the committee's allegations, but an HHS official told CBS News, speaking on the condition of anonymity, that the Republicans have misrepresented the requirements under the 21st Century Cures Act. That law says the institute and center directors "shall be appointed by the Secretary, acting through the Director of the National Institutes of Health."

The anonymous HHS official told CBS News that the department stood by the legality of the appointments by the acting NIH director, and that Becerra's affidavits were intended to guard against legal challenges.

"I suspect the American taxpayer is going to pay millions of dollars defending lawsuits from various groups and various organizations that think they've either done wrong or they didn't like the policies that came out during that time period," Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., said during the news conference.

McMorris Rodgers summed up her rationale for pursuing the investigation by saying, "No one is above the law."

Still, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, writing in an opinion piece for the Messenger, conceded that the appointment drama could be dismissed "as a matter of no harm, no foul."

"After all, this appears simple (albeit shocking) negligence by the Biden administration as opposed to some nefarious effort," wrote Turley, a favorite legal scholar of conservatives. "Yet, if true, billions of dollars in grants and thousands of personnel and policy changes could be questioned."

Griffith summed up the situation more colorfully. "It's just a huge mess and it could have all been avoided," said the Virginia Republican, who chairs the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. "This is just a big cow pie in the field, and they just stepped in it and stomped in it and acted like it was fun and games until two weeks ago."

Becerra is scheduled to testify before an Energy and Commerce subcommittee on July 26. McMorris Rodgers said she expects a written response to her committee's questions from the department before that hearing.

Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.