Trump Administration Illegally Cut Billions In Health Grants, Federal Watchdog Says

By Benjamin J. Hulac | Washington Correspondent For the NJ Spotlight News

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration broke federal law when it abruptly canceled more than 1,800 health grants, terminating funding Congress approved, a federal watchdog agency said.

The Government Accountability Office found the administration closed these grants, which Congress had appropriated for the National Institutes of Health, in violation of a 1974 budget law.

Fears of devastation across NJ health, scientific research if Trump cuts proceedBetween February and June, the administration illegally held back $8 billion in NIH funding, GAO found, adding that the NIH overall had obligated 38% less during that period than the same window last year.

In a letter to the GAO, the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes NIH, said it had started issuing new grants as of late July but did not elaborate about reinstating the halted grants

The decision marks the fifth time the GAO found the administration illegally held back money Congress approved, a common theme during the second presidency of Donald Trump, who has routinely broken federal budget laws and clashed with Congress over federal spending since his return to Washington.

Dozens of open investigations

The GAO, a widely respected nonpartisan agency started in 1921 and expanded in the decades since, has dozens of open investigations pending to ferret out if the president or top White House aides have terminated funding Congress has approved.

When done without congressional approval, that termination is called impoundment and is illegal.

Last week, the GAO determined the administration violated the same law when it blocked funding Congress allocated to lower energy use, electricity costs and improve air quality at public schools.

‘Cutting off investments Congress has made into research that saves millions of lives is as backward and as inexcusable as it gets.’ — Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington)

Separately, the GAO in May found the president illegally impounded funds for electric-vehicle charging stations. In June, investigators at the agency determined Trump impounded money for museums and libraries nationwide. And in July, the GAO held the president also illegally denied funding for early-childhood Head Start programs.

In late July, the administration said it would release about $160 million in federal education funding set for New Jersey, after a delay in providing that funding upended school districts’ plans.

After criticism from Republicans, Democrats and educators, the administration agreed to release the frozen funds, collectively more than $6 billion nationwide.

Accused of attempt to ‘wreck’ medical research system

“Over the last six months, President Trump and his administration have done just about everything they can to wreck our nation’s medical research system, and they have dangerously set back our efforts to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, and so much else,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the most senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which writes federal budgets, said in a statement.

‘Stand Up for Science’: State House rally against research cuts“Cutting off investments Congress has made into research that saves millions of lives is as backward and as inexcusable as it gets,” Murray said.

In June, a federal judge in Boston ruled that terminations of some NIH grants were “void and illegal.”

In its pending budget request to Capitol Hill, the administration proposed a $33 billion cut, or about 26%, to the Department of Health and Human Services and a 39% cut to NIH.

Aggressive moves

A little more than a week into his term, Trump placed a sweeping freeze on federal grants and loans, throwing billions of dollars’ worth of programs into a hazy future and jolting Congress into action against the freeze.

Similar aggressive moves have been frequent in the second Trump term.

“The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan,” Russ Vought, the head of the White House budget office, told reporters at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast last month, remarks that drew rebuke from Democrats and mild pushback from some Republicans.

Vought is a key architect of the legislation, now law as of mid-July, to cancel about $9 billion in funding for foreign aid and public media that Congress had already approved.

Republicans used an uncommon strategy known as a “rescission” to cancel that chunk of money. Vought has floated the idea of future rescissions this Congress.