OMB Director Vought: NIH 'Does Nothing More than DEI Research'

Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought said the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “does nothing more than DEI research.

Vought said, “We’re going through the same programmatic review of the NIH that we did on education funding. So NIH is a program that if they were a company that went through the last pandemic, their stock market, their stock prices would be in shambles. I mean, they fundamentally mismanaged and in some respects caused the pandemic by their own research, gain of function research. Put that aside for a second. Now you have waste, fraud and abuse of funding, injecting dogs with cocaine and studying the impacts of it, giving money to Harvard to study lizards being blown off of branches by leaf blowers. Every step of the way, you have fundamental DEI across the board.”

He continued, “You literally have an entire institute that does nothing more than DEI research at NIH.”

Vought added, “We have fully funded all important research through our budget proposal. We will continue to make sure that funding goes out, but we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that NIH is not weaponized and wasteful against the American people.”

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