House Republicans launched an investigation on Wednesday into how the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health are handling concerns of civil rights violations and antisemitism at universities receiving federal funding for health research.
More than $506 million in federal biomedical research funding through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, has gone to 14 universities within the past year, 11 of which have recently been or are currently under investigation for potentially violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act for permitting antisemitic behavior on campus.
Five Republican leaders, including Education and Workforce Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Energy and Commerce Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), sent a letter to the ARPA-H director on Wednesday inquiring about how HHS and NIH have handled civil rights concerns at federally funded institutions “to ensure a research environment free of harassment and discrimination, especially towards those of Jewish faith and heritage.”
Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, whose presidents received protracted scrutiny for their failure to explicitly denounce calls for genocide against Jews during congressional testimony, received a combined total of $138 million from the ARPA-H program.
Columbia University, which has been sued in federal court for civil rights violations and is undergoing several investigations by both Congress and the Department of Education, received nearly $40 million from the program as of this August.
The University of California San Francisco also received $35 million as of this April despite the fact that it is currently under investigation from Energy and Commerce for concerns of antisemitism at the university, medical school, and affiliated medical centers.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents increased by 361% in the three months between the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and January 2024.
The ADL recorded 732 campus-based incidents of antisemitism during this three-month period, compared to 63 incidents during the same period in 2022.
The committees asked the ARPA-H director, Renee Wegryzn, to provide the committee with a detailed explanation of what steps, if any the program has taken to ensure that federally funded institutions are complying with Title VI and whether or not there have been any complaints of harassment or discrimination associated with an ARPA-H project.
Earlier this year, the Energy and Commerce Committee escalated an investigation into sexual harassment allegations from within the NIH and at institutions receiving NIH funds. So far, the multi-year investigation has exposed at least 300 cases, but the NIH has been reticent to comply with the congressional investigation, prompting the committee to issue a subpoena for documents in February.
ARPA-H is an independent agency within the NIH, but it reports directly to the Secretary of HHS, Xavier Becerra, who was formerly the Attorney General of California.
The committees requested a response by Oct. 16.