The National Institutes of Health is having second thoughts about a behemoth $89 billion contract it awarded to a seemingly dormant California nonprofit organization during the final days of former president Joe Biden’s term.
The National Cancer Institute, a subsidiary of the NIH, awarded a 25-year, $89 billion contract to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research to operate a cancer research lab at Maryland’s Fort Detrick on January 17, just three days before Biden left office. The reward marked a remarkable turn of fortune for the nascent nonprofit organization, which shares close ties to the University of California’s National Laboratories but hadn’t raised or spent a penny since its founding in 2022, according to its available Form 990 tax filings. The nonprofit group exists with the "specific purpose to operate exclusively for the benefit of, to perform the functions of, and/or to carry out the purposes of The Regents of the University of California," according to its 2022 tax filing.
But the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research now risks seeing its multibillion-dollar taxpayer-funded windfall slip through its fingers, according to an April 8 notice obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, showing that the Department of Health and Human Services—NIH’s parent agency—is reevaluating all the original bids for the contract and will possibly award it to another company.
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