Problems linger at NIEHS

Written byBob Grant

| 2 min read

A report from the National Institutes of Health has detailed a suite of management and ethics problems at the agency's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The linkurl:report,;http://finance.senate.gov/press/Gpress/2008/prg041508a.pdf which was sent to Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) yesterday (Apr 15), unearthed apparent grant funding irregularities at NIEHS. The agency awarded grants to 45 applications that had scored beyond the payline between FY 2005 and FY 2007, without documenting the justifications for making these exceptions, according to the report. Funding federal grant applications that are ranked above the payline is rare but is not, in itself, a violation of the rules. But properly documented justification is required in these cases. The report also stated that the ethics program at NIEHS lacked sufficient personnel, documentation of ethics actions, and attention to conflicts of interest within the agency. According to the report, most of the financial disclosure reports filed by NIEHS employees between 2004 and 2007 were either "not reviewed by NIEHS ethics staff or were reviewed and certified, but with obvious errors." The NIH's Ethics office reviewed a sample of 48 confidential financial disclosure reports filed by NIEHS employees in 2004 and 2005, and found that the NIEHS's ethics staff had reviewed only 24 of the reports. As part of the report, an NIH consultant carried out a survey of attitudes last fall and found that a linkurl:negative perception;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53502/ of NIEHS leadership persists among agency staffers. The report found that perceptions of "poor communications, retribution, a hostile leadership style, favoritism, and nepotism," were widespread among NIEHS employees. Last year Grassley began inquiring about management problems at NIEHS that largely focused on the agency's former director, linkurl:David Schwartz,;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54298/ who linkurl:resigned;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/54296/ earlier this year. After receiving the report yesterday, Grassley linkurl:asked;http://finance.senate.gov/press/Gpress/2008/prg041508.pdf NIH director, Elias Zerhouni, to officially respond to NIEHS's decision to fund 45 grants out of rank order without justifying those awards.

Meet the Author

Bob Grant

From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.

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Problems linger at NIEHS

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