A mistake by a congressional staff member ignited a review of re-search projects approved by the National Institutes of Health. But despite what U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., called “scientific McCarthyism,” it turned out Congress had not declared war on the NIH approval process.
During an Oct. 2 oversight hearing, several U.S. representatives questioned the health value to the nation of several studies approved by the NIH. Some time after that hearing, someone from Congress sent the agency a list of hundreds of questionable projects.
The exact source was initially unknown, and the agency assumed it was being asked to justify those projects to Congress. So it began to undertake a review of those studies.
A few days after the list was sent, the sender was revealed as a mere staff member for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, whose subcommittee on oversight and investigations has been reviewing the NIH grant-approval process.
The list had not been prepared by the committee, but by an organization called the Traditional Values Coalition, which claims to represent 43,000 churches across the nation.
Committee spokesman Ken Johnson told the Baltimore Sun that the staff member had sent the list by mistake and had “exercised poor judgment.”
“You’ve got nameless, faceless bureaucrats funding bizarre stuff, inappropriate stuff,” said Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the TVC, in the Chronicle of Higher Education online’s daily news of Oct. 31. “There needs to be accountability at the NIH.”
“We are not targeting these grants,” Johnson said, adding it was “much ado about nothing.”
John T. Burkow, NIH spokesman, told the Chronicle that the agency would give Congress a general, not detailed, explanation of the research projects on the TVC list “very soon.”
Jon Sanders is an assistant editor of Carolina Journal.