The federal government is taking dramatic steps to confront the teenage vaping epidemic, including raising the national age to buy tobacco products to 21 and banning most vaping flavors. To enforce all these new rules and continue important research, the federal government must do something it’s not very good at: use tax dollars in the most appropriate and effective ways possible.
Already, there’s evidence that federal tobacco research money is being abused.
Take, for example, the case of Stanton Glantz, an influential professor at the University of California, San Francisco. For years, Glantz was known as an established and authoritative tobacco researcher, even bringing the university a five-year grant worth $20 million from the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health in 2013 — a grant that he was reawarded in 2018.
In the days before the grant was reawarded to Glantz, however, he paid $150,000 to settle a lawsuit filed against him by Eunice Neely, a former researcher in his lab. In the lawsuit, Glantz was accused of repeated cases of sexual harassment and abusive workplace practices, including threats to remove Neely’s name from a study she had worked on after she filed her harassment complaint with the university. A university investigation into the allegations found that Neely was not alone, discovering five other women who had experienced similar harassment from Glantz as far back as 2006.
Unfortunately, he faced few repercussions from the university for his actions and was allowed to continue in his position while remaining a recipient of the FDA and the NIH grant worth millions. While he recently announced he will be stepping down from his role leading the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education on June 30, he will continue to serve as the principal investigator for the UCSF Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science in addition to working on other grants.
This case is illustrative of the broader concern involving government-funded tobacco research. If a high-profile harasser is allowed to continue receiving millions in taxpayer money, how many similar cases of potential abuse and waste have gone under the radar? It demonstrates not only the need to better hold harassers such as Glantz accountable but also to prevent similar misuses of existing federal funds in the future.
Glantz’s case also shows precisely why immediately resorting to raising taxes on consumers is not just misguided, it is irresponsible. Without first determining whether existing taxpayer funds are being used properly, it is impossible to decide responsibly that we should further raise taxes on consumers. Otherwise, consumers will be paying higher prices just to foot the bill for wasting public funds.
State governments and agencies such as the FDA and the NIH must seriously reevaluate where their current funds are spent and how they could be more responsibly allocated in the future.
Taxpayers should not have to pay the price for government officials misallocating resources, whether to harassers such as Glantz or similarly unworthy projects. Instead, as is often the case, government officials need to better devote themselves to conducting due diligence and confirming that public funds are truly being used in the public interest.
Matt Mackowiak is the president of the Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C.-based Potomac Strategy Group. He’s a Republican consultant, a Bush administration and Bush-Cheney reelection campaign veteran, and a former press secretary to two U.S. senators.
