The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee is demanding copies of contracts and grants between the Department of Health and Human Services and a cancer research institute in Italy that Republicans say provided controversial and biased research that has led to incorrect decisions about the safety of some products.
The federal government has provided about $92 million in grants to an Italian researcher, the Ramazzini Institute, since 2009, and about $2 million in other contracts, according to the committee’s letter to HHS, which cited media reports.
But Ramazzini’s transparency and findings have been questioned. For example, a 2012 decision by Ramazzini saying that the artificial sweetener sucralose was a cancer-causing agent was directly contradicted in May by the European Food Safety Authority.
Wednesday’s committee letter also outlined an incident from 2010 in which the EPA decided to abandon any reliance on studies from Ramazzini on methanol, and noted that the EPA’s National Toxicology Program cited concerns about elements of Ramazzini’s methodologies.
Issues like these are what prompted the science committee to ask HHS to outline all the funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to Ramazzini. The committee made a similar request in March, but it said documents received so far from HHS “only raised new questions.”
The committee is essentially asking HHS to start over in responding to a request for documentation on how some grants and contracts were awarded to the research institute. But the new request also indicated that some of the grants appear to have been made informally, and asked HHS if those distributions were made according to competitive bidding rules, or if they were sole-source contracts.
“Specifically, the Committee is concerned about the informal nature of the agreements and contracts between NIEHS and RI, the lack of evidence of competition in contracting, and the unjustified continuation of the contracts for 17 years,” Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, wrote to HHS Secretary Tom Price on Wednesday.
The committee letter said lawmakers have “significant concerns about whether NIEHS was operating within the rigorous confines” of federal regulations about awarding contracts, and asked HHS to supply numerous grant and contract documents as well as all communications between NIEHS staff and Ramazzini related to those grants.
The free-market think tank E&E Legal currently has a FOIA lawsuit against NIEHS to obtain contracts with Ramazzini.
The Ramazzini inquiry by the House committee comes as the political battles over science have intensified between Republicans who say the government has relied on non-transparent science for too many years, and Democrats who accuse Republicans of being anti-science by not incorporating as much data as possible, or simply ignoring scientific data altogether.
