Page:Senator-rubio-letter-to-nih-re-woke-priorities.pdf/1

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Dr. Lawrence Tabak Director National Institutes of Health U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 9000 Rockville Pike Bethesda, MD 20892 Dear Dr. Tabak:

For decades, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been the leading entity in supporting research and development of our nation’s greatest health challenges. In 2022 alone, NIH-funded research led to progress in the development of an HIV vaccine, greater understanding of Alzheimer’s disease, and an additional treatment option for individuals with type 1 diabetes to reduce the need for insulin. The NIH was created to be a non-partisan, nonpolitical beacon of medical innovation. However, I am concerned that recent actions by the agency to cater to the administration’s “progressive” base calls into question the agency’s institutional integrity and ability to allocate taxpayer dollars towards trusted research.

There are countless and recent efforts by the agency to address, as former NIH Director Francis Collins put it, the purported “stain” of “structural racism” in biomedical science. However, the agency provides no evidence of structural racism outside of demographic data on its workforce, its applicants and its recipients. In February 2021, the NIH established the UNITE Initiative to address structural racism within biomedical research and improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, in all NIH offices, through a consortium of five new committees. Since then, the NIH has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to establish an anti-racism steering committee, develop racial and ethnic equity plans for each NIH institute and center, and showcase art within NIH buildings to “reflect the full diversity of the NIH staff,” among many other efforts. All time and effort put towards these efforts distracts NIH from its mission of pursuing research to solve some of today’s most pressing medical challenges.

Not only is the agency spending millions of dollars to support wokeness, NIH grantees are encouraged to reject candidates that do not fall in step with this liberal ideology. For example, in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, John Sailer, senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars, analyzed two NIH-funded programs in South Carolina and New Mexico. The results showed that candidates who emphasized “treat[ing] everyone the same” and race neutrality received lower scores on evaluations of a candidate’s contribution to DEI. Alternatively, the rubrics praised candidates who treat DEI as a “core value.” The agency has released guidance, on many occasions, encouraging its workforce to prioritize DEI in its hiring processes. It is critical for the NIH to be evaluating grantees based on the competence of the