Washington D.C. – In a stunning abuse of taxpayer money at the expense of public health, the Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee has discovered Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department signed a secret interagency agreement – “without notifying Congress” — that allows DoD to sap billions of dollars from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for Hegseth’s own departmental purposes. This is money Congress specifically appropriated for research to find treatments or cures for infectious diseases including influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola, and many other dangerous diseases.
Leslie Dach, Chair of Protect Our Care: “Donald Trump chose to start a costly war with Iran after giving billionaires and big corporations trillions of dollars in tax breaks – and now wants American patients to unknowingly foot the Defense Department’s bills. Not a single dollar Congress appropriated for life-saving disease research should go into the bumbling hands of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for any claimed purpose. And frankly, no one should take Hegseth’s DoD at its word about the military research they supposedly plan to fund with taxpayer money that was meant to find cures for diseases here at home. Over six months into the unwanted conflict in Iran that Trump promised would take “four to five weeks”, missiles are reportedly running low. Given Secretary Hegseth’s history of lying through his teeth about our national security and the fact this budgetary sleight of hand was reluctantly revealed to Congress, would anyone be surprised if these raided NIH funds were actually intended to buy more bombs? This backroom deal at the expense of public health needs to be revoked immediately followed by a serious Congressional investigation into the extent of and motives behind the Trump administration’s taxpayer money shell game.”
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