Billions of untracked federal grants are funding cat experiments and Wuhan lab research in China and Russia, according to Ernst.

Hundreds of millions of American tax dollars went to recipients in China and Russia in recent years without being properly tracked by the federal government, including a grant that enabled a state-run Russian lab to test cats on treadmills, according to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).

Ernst and her staff investigators, working with auditors at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service (CRS), plus two non-profit Washington watchdogs—Open The Books (OTB) and the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP)—discovered dozens of other grants not counted on the federal government’s USASpending.gov internet database.

The total value of the uncounted grants the Ernst team found is $1.3 billion, but that amount is just the tip of the iceberg, GAO reports.

Among the newly discovered grants is $4.2 million to China’s infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) “to conduct dangerous experiments on bat coronaviruses and transgenic mice,” according to a May 31 Ernst statement provided to The Epoch Times.

The $4.2 million exposed by Ernst is in addition to previously reported funding to WIH for extensive gain-of-function research by Chinese scientists, much of it funded in whole or part prior to the Coronavirus Pandemic by National Institutes for Health (NIH) grants channeled through the EcoHealth Alliance medical research non-profit. The NIH has awarded seven grants totaling more than $4.1 million to EcoHealth to study various aspects of SARS, MERS, and other coronavirus diseases.

Buying Chinese Puppy Parts

As part of another U.S.-funded grant, hearts and other organs from 425 dogs in China were purchased for medical research. “These countryside dogs in China are part of the farmer’s household; they were mainly used for guarding. Their diet includes boiled rice, discarded raw food animal tissues and whatever dogs can forage. These dogs were sold for food,” stated an NIH study uncovered by the Ernst researchers.

Other previously unreported grants exposed by the Ernst team include $1.6 million to Chinese companies from the federal government’s National School Lunch Program, and $4.7 million for health insurance from a Russian company that was sanctioned by the United States in 2022 as a result of the invasion of Ukraine.

“It’s gravely concerning that Washington’s reckless spending has reached the point where nobody really knows where all tax dollars are going. But I have the receipts and I’m shining a light on this, so bureaucrats can no longer cover up their tracks and taxpayers can know exactly what their hard-earned dollars are funding,” Ernst separately told The Epoch Times.

The problem is federal officials don’t rigorously track sub-awards made by initial grant recipients, according to the Iowa Republican. Such sub-awards are covered by a multitude of federal regulations that stipulate many conditions to ensure the tax dollars are appropriately spent.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in an April 2023 report that “limitations in sub-award data is a government-wide issue and not unique to U.S. funding to entities in China. GAO is currently examining the state of federal government-wide sub-award data as part of a separate review.”

The Eco-Health sub-awards to WIH illustrate the problem.

“Despite being required by law to make these receipts available to the public on the USAspending.gov website, EcoHealth tried to cover its tracks by intentionally not disclosing the amounts of taxpayer money being paid to WIV, which went unnoticed for years,” Ernst said in the statement.

“I was able to determine that more than $490 million of taxpayer money was paid to organizations in China [in] the last five years. That’s ten times more than GAO’s estimate! Over $870 million was paid to entities in Russia during the same period!

“Together that adds up to more than $1.3 billion paid to our adversaries. But again, these numbers still do not represent the total dollar amounts paid to institutions in China or Russia since those numbers are not tracked and the information that is being collected is incomplete,” Ernst continued.

Adam Andrzejewski, the founder and chairman of OTB, told The Epoch Times that “when following the money at the state and local level, the real corruption exists in the subc