House GOP claims Fauci and other NIH officials may lack legal appointments.

Investigation Reveals Legal Questions Surrounding Appointment of NIH Directors

Former National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease (NAIAD) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and a dozen other directors of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) appear not to have been legally appointed to their offices, according to a year-long investigation by House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans.

Mr. Fauci and the others were to serve five-year terms, beginning not later than Dec. 13, 2021, but repeated requests since March 2022 to Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra by the committee for documents verifying the appointments were delayed or ignored, according to GOP committee aides speaking on background.

Because of the questions about their legal status, every decision made by the directors, including most critically, the winners of nearly $26 billion in research grants, could be subject to extended litigation or outright nullification.

“We are being cautious about the implications here because this is unprecedented,” one of the GOP aides told journalists. It is not clear, the aides said, if, for example, the entire award process would have to be repeated, a process that could cause chaos among researchers and additional costs to taxpayers.

Research Grants and the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Among the $26 billion in grants now in question is the latest to Eco-Health Alliance, the New York-based non-profit through which the NIH sent at least $1.7 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The Wuhan lab is believed by many intelligence and biomedical experts to have been the source of the COVID-19 Coronavirus that has killed more than 1 million Americans. The disease prompted federal officials to declare a national pandemic that lasted more than a year and inflicted severe social, political, and economic damage.

Spokesmen for HHS and NIH did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

In a July 7, 2023, letter to Mr. Becerra, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the energy and commerce chairman, said his “failure to follow the law and ensure accountability of billions of dollars in taxpayer funding at [NIH] … could have grave implications for the validity of actions taken by 14 NIH Institute and Center (IC) Directors during their unlawful tenure, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

Also signing the letter to Mr. Becerra with Ms. McMorris Rodgers were Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), who is chairman of the energy and commerce panel’s health subcommittee, Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), who heads the panel’s oversight and investigations subcommittee.

Failure to Follow the Law

The heart of the problem, according to the signers, is that Mr. Becerra failed to appoint the 14 to new five-year terms by Dec. 13, 2021, as required by the 21st Century Cures Act, which was approved by Congress and signed into law by former President Barack Obama. The Cures Act also requires the appointments to be made by the HHS chief, not the head of the NIH.

“It has become increasingly clear that you never appointed or reappointed the 14 NIH IC Directors in December of 2021. HHS and the NIH repeatedly assured the committee that the NIH IC Directors were validly reappointed but did not produce proper supporting documentation,” the signers told Mr. Becerra.

“For example, in its first response to the committee on April 5, 2022, the NIH claimed ‘[a]ll current IC Directors who were serving as of December 13, 2016, have undergone review and have been reappointed to new 5-year term appointments,’ and submitted a chart showing that the NIH Director was the official who made the reappointments of the NIH IC Directors, which even if true, is contrary to what the law requires,” they said.

Multiple additional requests from the committee to HHS for documents regarding the 14 appointments met with no concrete response.