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July 30, 2011
A conservative group is calling on Congress to temporarily suspend funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after releasing a study that found the agency wasted half a billion dollars in taxpayer money on “bizarre projects,” and gave more than $90 million to China, America’s largest creditor, over the last decade for other research.
The Traditional Values Coalition, which represents 43,000 churches across the country, sent a letter to Appropriations Committees in both houses of Congress this week urging them to freeze funding for six months while investigating the agency’s research practices that are “striking working families across America as wasteful, illicit, and in many cases outright offensive.”
As part of its six-month investigation into NIH’s budget, the coalition discovered that the agency awarded more than $90 million to the Chinese government over the last decade, including $30 million in the last two and half years alone to scientists working at Chinese universities and institutions to research medical issues that affect Chinese citizens.
The coalition has also found that NIH has paid more than half a billion in funding grants to researchers to “conduct bizarre projects such as trying to find out if a mother rat will abandon her babies if given cocaine, and asking individuals to mail in their toenail clippings.”
“As our country heads to fiscal ruin, why are we giving millions in taxpayer dollars to Chinese science – which benefits China and its institutions – when they hold more than $1 trillion in American debt?” asked Andrea Lafferty, president of the TVC.
“It is simply unacceptable for the NIH to pay Chinese researchers to study acupuncture, or fund international research, when we are struggling to pay our own debts,” she said. “That China, our biggest creditor, is the recipient makes this waste all the more credible.”
China has also received a $718,000 EPA grant over the last decade for “air pollution” efforts.
The NIH-funded projects include $2 million for Chinese and American scientists to develop a vaccine against parasites that affect water buffalo, snails and about 1 million Chinese citizens.
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Related LINK: Read by clicking on blue letters
Want to Know WHAT $$ go OUT of Washington? “Raising the Debt Ceiling” For Dummies
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“Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.”
~~Ronald Reagan
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