Revealed: inside the US military's plan to tap huge sums from the NIH

Nature (Sep 4, requires subscription for full text)

"The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking to redirect research projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars from its infectious-diseases institute to military biodefence programmes at the US Department of Defense (DOD), according to two NIH employees.

"They confirmed to Nature that the NIH and the DOD, also called the Department of War, have signed an agreement for the arrangement. The NIH is now identifying projects it would transfer to the DOD and aims to complete the agreement by the end of September, when the fiscal year ends and some funds expire, according to a third NIH employee who is a senior official at the agency. (The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.) 

"... The agreement would establish a pathway to move funding out of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the country’s premier infectious-disease research institute, to support defence initiatives and will last 10 years, according to the three sources. The full agreement has not yet been finalized, the sources say.

"Biosecurity researchers warn that shifting biomedical research to the military threatens the transparency and clinical translation that define NIH-funded work. “The Department of Defense is just not set up to deliver the scientific innovations we have come to expect and rely on from NIH,” says Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity specialist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland."

Defense Officials Attempt to Raid NIH Funds to Cover Department of Defense Activities

US House Appropriations Committee Democrats (Sep 3)

"House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) has learned that officials at the Department of Defense (DoD) are working to divert billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to supplement the Department’s budget.

"Without notifying Congress or the American people, DoD has signed an interagency agreement that could give the Department access to billions of dollars that Congress provided to NIH for critical biomedical research. These funds were provided to support research to develop treatments or cures for infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola, and other dangerous pathogens."