Fauci and Other NIH "Directors" Have Been Acting Without Any Actual Government Authorization

A House Committee says that Biden failed to legally reappoint the directors of the National Institutes of Health, so Fauci and his other clowns have been exercising government power without legal government authorization.

As Jonathan Turley says, "The result is an intriguing question of whether officials like Fauci were operating without authority while spending billions and implementing national health policies."

Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced intense scrutiny in the past over his testimony denying any funding of "gain-of-function" research at the Wuhan lab in China. However, the most serious question now may be whether Fauci was who he said he was in those hearings: the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

On Friday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce issued a letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra that raises the disturbing question of whether Fauci and 13 other National Institutes of Health (NIH) institute and center directors were unlawfully holding their offices for some period. Not only did these directors make sweeping policy changes for the nation but, in 2022 alone, they awarded more than $25 billion in federal biomedical grants.

The problem is the 21st Century Cures Act, passed in 2016. Section 2033 of that act is titled "Increasing Accountability at the National Institutes of Health," and it seeks to achieve greater accountability by requiring the HHS secretary to personally appoint those directors. For reasons the Biden administration has yet to explain, it appears to have ignored the law, according to the House committee. Under the five-year terms granted in 2016, these directors had to be reappointed by Becerra by December 2021. It is not clear if this task was delegated to the NIH director, but the law appears to be clear: There is no delegation; it must be Becerra who renews such appointments.

CNN's senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, once gushed that when "Dr. Fauci talks, he's just like a regular guy." It turns out she might have been more accurate than she thought -- because Fauci legally may have been just a "regular guy" giving out billions without authority.

What is equally baffling is that the House informed the administration that it was presumptively in violation of federal law. What followed were convoluted and confusing statements from the administration on a very simple question: Did Becerra appoint these directors?

He seems to have not appointed them -- and is now attempting to claim he can retroactively appoint them, though, of course, the law does not give him the power to go back in time to make appointments.

posted by Ace at 03:00 PM

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