Sen. Chuck Grassley hails agency’s decision to reverse Biden’s ‘outrageous’ award
The National Institutes of Health is having second thoughts about a behemoth $89 billion contract it awarded to a seemingly dormant California nonprofit organization during the final days of former president Joe Biden’s term.
The National Cancer Institute, a subsidiary of the NIH, awarded a 25-year, $89 billion contract to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research to operate a cancer research lab at Maryland’s Fort Detrick on January 17, just three days before Biden left office. The reward marked a remarkable turn of fortune for the nascent nonprofit organization, which shares close ties to the University of California’s National Laboratories but hadn’t raised or spent a penny since its founding in 2022, according to its available Form 990 tax filings. The nonprofit group exists with the “specific purpose to operate exclusively for the benefit of, to perform the functions of, and/or to carry out the purposes of The Regents of the University of California,” according to its 2022 tax filing.
But the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research now risks seeing its multibillion-dollar taxpayer-funded windfall slip through its fingers, according to an April 8 notice obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, showing that the Department of Health and Human Services—NIH’s parent agency—is reevaluating all the original bids for the contract and will possibly award it to another company.
The agency’s move came just weeks after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) sent a letter in late February to the NIH demanding to know why the agency awarded the massive contract to an untested nonprofit with close ties to the University of California, a system that, according to the senator, not only has a history of spending around 40 percent of its federal research funding on administrative costs, but also has a dubious record of leaving its laboratories open to national security breaches by the Chinese Communist Party.
“It’s outrageous Biden’s NIH shoved a nearly $90 billion contract out the door just days before President Trump returned to office,” Grassley told the Free Beacon. “Even worse, the money would have flowed to an organization that can’t clearly protect itself from adversaries like China. I’m very glad HHS heeded my calls to reverse course and is now re-evaluating its initial proposal. I urge the department to ensure efficient use of taxpayer dollars as it works to defeat cancer and save lives.”
The NIH is reevaluating the blockbuster contract to the untested nonprofit group as the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE continues to probe the federal government for wasteful spending authorized by the prior administration. The Environmental Protection Agency in February stripped a $2 billion grant from a nonprofit linked to perennial Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams that had reported receiving $100 in total revenue before it received the reward, the Free Beacon reported.
The Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research, in its latest tax filing, identified five members on its board of directors, four of which share close ties to the University of California’s National Laboratories. That includes the charity’s president, Craig Leasure, who until January 2024 served as vice president of the university’s National Laboratories. The group’s chief financial officer, Brett Henrikson, serves as chief of staff for the University of California’s National Laboratories.
Henrikson did not return a request for comment.
The nonprofit’s close ties to the University of California was of great concern to Grassley, who noted in his February 26 letter to NIH acting director Matthew Memoli that the university has a record of keeping about 40 percent of its federal research funding for research costs, a figure that far exceeds the Trump administration’s cap on such expenditures at 15 percent.
“It is critical to ensure taxpayer-funded research dollars are actually spent on research, not university administrative expenses,” Grassley wrote in his letter.
Grassley also said he was concerned about the University of California’s well-documented failure to protect its labs from security breaches by China’s government.
“It has been reported that between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 scientists who had worked at Los Alamos [National Laboratory] returned to China to support a variety of domestic research and development programs, including at least 59 who were involved with China’s talent programs,” Grassley wrote. “It appears that the University of California’s inability to keep China out of U.S. R&D is an issue that spans nearly four decades.”
The NIH and National Cancer Institute did not return requests for comment.
The cancer research lab at Maryland’s Fort Detrick had previously been under the management of Leidos Biomedical Research, which held that role for about 30 years before the Biden administration awarded the role to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research.
HHS notified Leidos on April 9 that NIH had taken the “voluntary corrective action” to reevaluate the initial contract proposals and possibly make a new reward determination, according to a letter obtained by the Free Beacon.
Leidos declined to comment.
