Rubio accuses NIH of pushing Biden’s ‘woke rhetoric’ on taxpayer-funded scientific research

FIRST ON FOX: Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is calling out the NIH for "prioritizing" woke initiatives, such as promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and gender surgeries, demanding answers on how funds at the U.S.'s primary health research agency are allocated.

"Instead of allocating critical funding towards important research efforts like Cancer Moonshot or the BRAIN Initiative, the NIH is using its $47.5 billion budget to fund initiatives and put forward messaging that caters to President Biden’s progressive base. These actions call into question the institutional integrity of the agency," Rubio wrote in a letter, which was exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital, to NIH acting Director Lawrence Tabak on Thursday. 

Rubio noted in his letter that the NIH has led the nation on health research through its "greatest health challenges," citing the agency’s development of an HIV vaccine last year and a new treatment option for people with type 1 diabetes. The Florida Republican told Tabak that the NIH was established to be a "non-partisan, non-political 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," Rubio continued. 

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Rubio pointed to how in 2021, the agency developed the "UNITE Initiative to address structural racism within biomedical research." The DEI initiative is described on the NIH website "​​as a think tank to promote equity" that focuses on three primary domains: "health disparities/minority health research (HD/MH), internal NIH workforce, and external biomedical and behavioral research workforce."

"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," Rubio wrote. 

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Rubio said the NIH’s embrace of "woke initiatives" goes a step further with its hiring process, arguing "NIH grantees are encouraged to reject candidates that do not fall in step with this liberal ideology." 

Rubio pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by the senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars, John Sailer, who analyzed two NIH-funded programs. He found that candidates who emphasized race neutrality and "treat[ing] everyone the same" were marked with lower grades for their contribution to DEI. On the flip side, candidates who emphasized DEI as a "core value" received praise. 

DEI has been a cornerstone for the agency since the Biden administration, and just in March, the NIH announced its "strategic plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility [DEIA]" for Fiscal Years 2023-2027. The plan is pitched on the NIH’s website as the agency’s "commitment to embracing, strengthening, and integrating DEIA across all NIH activities to achieve the agency’s mission."

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Rubio charged that the "NIH has completely catered to the administration’s woke rhetoric instead of the science of so called ‘gender-affirming care.’" The Florida Republican said the NIH is championing gender surgeries and puberty blockers as "safe" while rolling out projects that are "harming patients, and then considering the study a success."

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A New England Journal of Medicine study examining the psychological effects of youths diagnosed with gender dysphoria who received hormone treatments found that two patients committed suicide. 

"Yet, the NIH only mentions the deaths of these young people as ‘adverse events’ and concluded that two years of gender hormones result in positive psychosocial outcomes for young people," Rubio said. 

The Republican senator is calling on Tubak to issue a "prompt response" to eight questions in the letter, including: "How much funding has the NIH spent, over the past two years, on efforts related to or recommended by the UNITE Initiative?;" "If a grantee does not express support for DEI as a ‘core value’ of their research, will this applicant be denied from consideration?;" "What role do liberal activist groups play in crafting your department’s guidance on awarding funding to grantees?"

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"The agency is choosing to support deadly and irreversibly harmful procedures on Americans to signal to Biden’s base that they care about these issues. Though we are on the cusp of breakthroughs for multiple medical conditions impacting the daily lives of millions of Americans, the NIH has decided to allocate its resources towards woke ‘science,’" Rubio wrote.