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For us, "follow the money" is more than just a catchphrase; it's a mission statement. And we're excited to renew our effort with the Cost Openness and Spending Transparency (COST) Act.
The COST Act will increase public access to information about taxpayer-funded projects, and ensure accountability in government. Better yet, not only will this bill stop waste, but it could potentially prevent another pandemic.
The disaster that unfolded at the U.S. government-funded Wuhan virology lab that likely caused the COVID pandemic underscores why more transparency about government spending is vital to our nation's economic well-being and public health.
As the White Coat Waste Project first exposed in April 2020, through a series of secretive subgrants a U.S. nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance funneled $600,000 in tax money to the Wuhan lab from 2015 to 2019 for animal experiments that intentionally souped-up bat coronaviruses to make them deadlier and more contagious to humans. White Coat Waste also unearthed emails showing how National Institutes of Health (NIH) bureaucrats worked with EcoHealth and the Wuhan lab in 2016 to bypass a federal ban on dangerous gain-of-function experiments. What's worse is that EcoHealth and the NIH kept shipping our money to this Chinese Communist Party-run bioagent lab despite U.S. State Department warnings about inadequate safety measures there as far back as 2018.
Don't take our word for it. A recent inspector general report sharply criticized EcoHealth and the NIH for their stunning failure to manage the money sent to Wuhan.
How did we get to a point where the U.S. government is shipping taxpayers' hard-earned cash to dangerous animal experimentation conducted at a virus lab run by one of our foremost foreign adversaries?
One of the biggest problems is that the NIH has a $45 billion budget and there is shockingly little transparency and accountability about its wasteful spending.
As a direct result of our ongoing joint efforts, the U.S. Government Accountability Office recently conducted an audit documenting how the NIH shipped over $2 billion of taxpayers' money to hundreds of animal testing laboratories in foreign countries with essentially no oversight. The beneficiaries of NIH's largesse included 200 animal labs in 44 different countries, including the notorious Wuhan lab and dozens of other shady facilities in China and Russia.
The audit confirmed that unlike taxpayer-funded labs in the U.S., foreign animal testing labs funded by NIH are never inspected, are completely exempt from U.S. laws and policies, and do not need to maintain an oversight committee or report abuses. Certain foreign grants funded by taxpayers don't even need to be disclosed at all. It's like the Wild West out there. We are working together to close these problematic loopholes carved out by the NIH.
We also need to improve enforcement of existing transparency laws governing spending at NIH. Since the late 1980s, a law called the Stevens Amendment has been included in every annual spending bill to mandate that entities receiving funding from NIH and a few other agencies publicly disclose details about how those dollars are used.
Unfortunately, as we've documented, this law is largely disregarded by many recipients of NIH funds. The violators include the infamous EcoHealth Alliance, which repeatedly failed to properly disclose in press releases, webpages, and other publications how exactly it is spending our money in China and the dozens of other countries where it's still using tax dollars for reckless virus-hunting and animal experiments.
The COST Act will make this long-standing disclosure requirement permanent, extend it to cover all federal agencies' spending, and strengthen it to improve compliance. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) introduced the bill in the upper chamber, and it's endorsed by our partners at FreedomWorks and the National Taxpayers Union.
Polls show that most Americans oppose gain-of-function experiments, want to defund animal labs run by foreign adversaries, and support spending transparency efforts like the COST Act.
Had we known sooner about the recipe for disaster that NIH and EcoHealth were cooking up in Wuhan, Congress and taxpayers would have never allowed Anthony Fauci's scary spending.
Taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent so we can find, expose, and defund Wuhan-style wasteful government spending. We've learned the hard way that it can be deadly.
Rep. Ralph Norman is a Republican representing South Carolina's 5th District. He serves on the House Budget, Rules, and Financial Services committees. Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President of White Coat Waste Project, a 3-million-member government watchdog group.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
