The National Institutes of Health should get tough with academic scientists by revoking their grants if they fail to report financial conflicts of interest to their institutions, said U.S. Senator Charles E. Grassley.
The Iowa Republican, ranking member of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, also has concerns about financial aid. He vowed to keep the heat on universities to ensure they spend more money from their endowments on aid for needy students. If institutions continue to improve in this area, he will not have to introduce legislation that forces them to do so, he said.
In an exclusive interview on Thursday with The Chronicle, Senator Grassley said he preferred increased openness about financial conflicts and better oversight of university finances, and not new regulations, to correct what he sees as problems in both areas.
“I’m on a campaign to make sure existing requirements of NIH and universities” are followed, “and I don’t think we have to pass any law to do that,” he said.
Recently, Senator Grassley has singled out several institutions—Harvard and Stanford Universities, and the University of Cincinnati—after his office determined that some scientists had underreported their own financial interests in research projects supported by the NIH (The Chronicle, June 8). Institutions are required by federal regulation to report the existence of those conflicts to the agency. Senator Grassley is seeking more details from approximately 20 additional institutions about financial conflicts among their scientists.
Since 1995, an NIH regulation has required scientists to report to their universities any “significant financial interests” they hold in research projects financed by the agency. Those are defined as income or equity interest of $10,000 from a company or 5-percent ownership of its stock. The universities, in turn, are required to tell the NIH whether they were able to manage or eliminate the conflicts in order to avoid bias in the research findings.
A January report by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH’s parent agency, said the NIH rarely checks up on the universities’ reports (The Chronicle, January 21). Meanwhile, Senator Grassley’s investigators found discrepancies when they asked pharmaceutical companies to list their payments to researchers and then asked universities to describe financial disclosures by those same scientists.
NIH Asked to Take the Lead
Mr. Grassley said that rather than leaning on the universities themselves, he expects to use the NIH as the lever to pressure them. The agency carries a big stick, he said.
“If University X isn’t doing their job, they pull one grant; that’s all they’d have to do, it would send a very clear signal,” the senator said. “I don’t know if I want to blame the university, although I don’t see how a university can be blameless.” He added that he had little control over university practices, “but I’ve got oversight over the NIH, and I want them to do their job.”
Senator Grassley said that the NIH has informed his staff that it believes it lacks the legal authority to revoke a grant on those grounds. But the senator disagrees.
“If you don’t have the authority to do it, I’ll work to get you the authority to do it,” he said. But the NIH needn’t wait for that, he said. “What university is going to sue the NIH because they pulled a grant because the university wasn’t doing what NIH says they have to do anyway? ... That’s like being caught with your hand in the cookie jar.”
Mr. Grassley also said he thinks the NIH has failed to ride herd on universities adequately because the agency wishes to maintain “buddy-buddy relationships with universities and with researchers,” ties that “are conflicts of interest in and of themselves.”
The agency is working to change the senator’s view. In a letter last week to Mr. Grassley, the NIH’s director, Elias A. Zerhouni, wrote that the agency was working to ensure that its oversight of financial conflicts “is both vigorous and effective.”
The NIH will soon formally request public comments about how the existing reporting requirements should be “enhanced,” he said.
Senator Grassley has already persuaded some of his fellow lawmakers to raise the pressure on the agency. A Senate subcommittee approved last month a spending bill for 2009—which has yet to be enacted into law—that bluntly directed the agency to fix the problem.
Raising Aid From University Endowments
Mr. Grassley said he will also be keeping his eye on another aspect of universities’ finances: how much of their endowment income they spend on student aid. He has criticized academic institutions with the largest endowments for spending too little for that purpose, and he recently asked 136 colleges for details about how they spend the income.
In their responses, many institutions emphasized that much of their endowment came from donors who restricted the gifts to certain purposes, and student aid was not always one of them.
Mr. Grassley said, “Since money is fungible, I’m not persuaded by the argument.” Despite recent declines in the stock market, the endowments’ growth before then provided “a lot of resources to help kids in need,” he said.
The senator said he is still considering legislation to require universities to spend a certain amount of their endowments each year, perhaps as much as 5 percent—"I’m not sure that I really want to do that, but that’s an option.” However, he said, he hopes it won’t be necessary if more universities voluntarily follow the lead of some elite universities to increase their spending from endowment income on financial aid and other purposes (The Chronicle, January 18).
“I think I see an evolution of change of concern of universities toward the use of their endowment to a greater extent to help students,” he said. “I want that to continue and to the extent to which it continues, it’s going to lessen the extent of my maybe writing legislation.”
