According to a College Fix story, the $89 billion grant was awarded to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research. The organization, which formed in 2022, is affiliated with the University of California system and its National Laboratories.
College Fix associate editor Matt Lamb says it appears the nonprofit Alliance was created to acquire federal grants but, so far, it has never received any funds nor performed any research.
“So it had just been sitting there, for three years," he says, "when suddenly it received this massive contract for very important research that had been handled evidently quite well for almost 30 years."
The grant came from a subsidiary of the NIH, the National Cancer Institute. NIH is a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The surprise grant for Alliance got the attention of Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican from Iowa. He was alarmed the contract was yanked from a cancer research lab located at Fort Detrick, the U.S. Army research facility located in Maryland, and given to an obscure and untested research facility.
Lamb points out Sen. Grassley was also concerned the Chinese Communist Party has been successful in penetrating National Laboratories with China-born scientist who return home with knowledge of the vital research that is performed there.
"It appears,” Grassley’s letter to NIH reads, “that the University of California’s inability to keep China out of U.S. [research and development] is an issue that spans nearly four decades."
Lamb says Leidos Biomedical Research, the lab at Fort Detrick, has been conducting research there for 30 years.
