NIH Doing Too Little to Stop Sexual Harassment Cases Among Its Grant Recipients, House Committee Chair Alleges

A powerful House committee chair wants an explanation for the National Institutes for Health’s (NIH) foot-dragging on more than 300 sexual harassment reports from women working for grantees like Yale University that get billions of dollars annually from the agency in federal research grants.

Noting that NIH has ignored her Aug. 11, 2022, request for information on the issue, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) reminded NIH Acting Director Lawrence Tabak of “the case of Axel Grothey, an oncologist who continued to co-chair a National Cancer Institute steering committee despite being disciplined by three states for inappropriate sexual conduct.” Grothey was not removed from the committee until “two years after complainants contacted the NIH.”

The reminder came in a March 14, 2023, letter signed and made public by McMorris Rodgers and Rep. Morgan Griffith, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the energy and commerce panel’s oversight and investigations subcommittee.

“The issue arising from the Grothey case is only one manifestation of a broader concern affecting NIH grantees and NIH-supported researchers. NIH’s own statistics show a significant problem with more than 300 cases related to harassment since 2018. That also represents hundreds of women who are being bullied or threatened,” McMorris Rodgers and Griffith told Tabak.

As a result, McMorris Rodgers and Griffith said in their letter, “we have concerns that NIH’s actions thus far are not adequate to ensure a safe and functional biomedical research workplace given the apparent scale of the challenges.

“All the more troubling is the fact that recent independent surveys have found top institutions and major NIH grant recipients with a high number of reported instances of sexual misconduct. In 2015, the Association of American Universities (AAU) conducted a campus survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct. This survey included over 150,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students at 27 universities that participated.

“For example, Yale University had the highest rates of female sexual assault with the exception of two other universities, which both boast a significantly larger student body population. Further, in 2019, AAU conducted a follow-up Campus Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct survey and found that sexual assaults at Yale had actually increased.”

Federal departments and agencies like NIH that provide grants to individuals, foundations, and companies are required by federal law to ensure no tax dollars go to recipients who do not strictly adhere to federal anti-sexual harassment laws and regulations.

“As you know, Yale has been among the largest recipients of federal taxpayer funding in the form of research grants. During the past 10 years, for example, Yale has received approximately 9,584 awards to faculty and professors totaling around $4.3 billion from NIH alone. Each of these grants were conditioned on Yale’s full compliance with applicable federal laws such as Title IX. We could cite several other major grantee institutions for similar issues,” McMorris Rodgers and Griffith told Tabak.

“Based on the massive number of NIH grants and billions of federal funds benefitting or inuring to the benefit of Yale and ongoing inquiries, we are concerned that Yale and other institutions may not have complied with their responsibilities under Title IX as a recipient of federal funds. Compliance with Title IX is more than a mere formality—it is a prerequisite for receipt of federal funds,” they continued.

The Epoch Times has requested comment on the concerns raised by McMorris Rodgers and Griffith from NIH and Yale University.

In their letter to the NIH chief, McMorris Rodgers and Griffith submitted a lengthy and detailed list of requests for information and explanations, including how many sexual harassment complaints have been received by the agency since 2019, whether the agency would know if a complainant was retaliated against by an NIH grant recipient and how would it respond if such information was conveyed to it.

The letter also noted that “as in the Grothey case, the persistence of a perpetrator in a position of power leads survivors and advocates to report,” and asked “how are letters to institute directors or direct reports to the NIH personnel handled? Since 2018, how many victims and/or complainants who have agreed to speak with the NIH been followed up with?”