Staff Reports
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is once again proving its incompetence when it comes to overseeing how federal funds are being used by foreign grant recipients. A recent report from the Health and Human Services Department inspector general has exposed the NIH’s abysmal failure to track how foreign recipients are spending taxpayer money. Shockingly, the report revealed that the overwhelming majority of required audit reports for foreign recipients were never obtained during fiscal years 2019 and 2020.
NIH failed to monitor grant spending by foreign researcher recipients, inspector general reportshttps://t.co/EhuAlG7zpI pic.twitter.com/LwQeFpzGOH
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) December 21, 2023
When the agency did manage to get their hands on reports that needed follow-up monitoring, NIH officials dropped the ball and failed to follow up a whopping 70% of the time. It’s like they’re playing a game of “hot potato” with accountability, and they’re definitely not winning. This further solidifies the fact that the NIH couldn’t monitor or oversee how federal funds were being used, leaving the door wide open for foreign researchers to potentially misuse funds without anyone in the U.S. government even knowing about it.
To add insult to injury, the NIH’s funding protocols have already come under fire for dishing out a hefty $8 million to a U.S.-based health organization, some of which ended up in the hands of China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. You know, the same lab that may or may not have had a hand in the whole COVID-19 mess. A previous NIH audit even uncovered that the American nonprofit had misreported $90,000 in expenses – it’s like they’re playing fast and loose with Monopoly money!
The audit found that foreign researchers have received millions of dollars in grants and other funding from NIH. The inspector general’s report exposed that the NIH didn’t bother to actively reach out to foreign grant recipients to obtain required audit reports.
Now, the NIH is looking at the inspector general report and saying, “Yeah, we’ll get right on that. Give us until September 2024 to fix it, okay?” The fact that this isn’t the first warning about the NIH’s lack of awareness of how researchers are using federal funds is downright alarming. Who knows, but in the meantime, taxpayers can only hope that their hard-earned cash isn’t being tossed around like confetti at a party they weren’t invited to.
