Did those guys really quit?
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Turley: Did the Administration Allow Fauci and Other Officials to Operate Illegally?
Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced intense scrutiny in the past over his testimony denying any funding of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan lab in China. However, the most serious question now may be whether Fauci was who he said he was in those hearings: the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
On Friday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce issued a letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra that raises the disturbing question of whether Fauci and 13 other National Institutes of Health (NIH) institute and center directors were unlawfully holding their offices for some period. Not only did these directors make sweeping policy changes for the nation but, in 2022 alone, they awarded more than $25 billion in federal biomedical grants.
The problem is the 21st Century Cures Act, passed in 2016. Section 2033 of that act is titled “Increasing Accountability at the National Institutes of Health,” and it seeks to achieve greater accountability by requiring the HHS secretary to personally appoint those directors. For reasons the Biden administration has yet to explain, it appears to have ignored the law, according to the House committee. Under the five-year terms granted in 2016, these directors had to be reappointed by Becerra by December 2021. It is not clear if this task was delegated to the NIH director, but the law appears to be clear: There is no delegation; it must be Becerra who renews such appointments.
What is equally baffling is that the House informed the administration that it was presumptively in violation of federal law. What followed were convoluted and confusing statements from the administration on a very simple question: Did Becerra appoint these directors?
It got even stranger on June 19 when HHS sent Congress documents titled “Ratification of Prior Selection and Prospective Appointment: Appointment Affidavit.” While signed by Becerra, the documents were dated on June 8 and June 15. They were specifically “prospective appointments” but seemed to suggest some form of retroactive ratification. That, too, is not allowed under federal law. In the case of Fauci and another director, according to the House committee, there is not even a retroactive affidavit to that effect.
Given the seemingly evasive response from HHS, it does appear that more than a dozen officials, including Fauci, may have been operating under a type of assumed official identity. If that turns out to be the case, Fauci may have had no legal authority after Dec. 12, 2021, to do even the most mundane tasks as a director.
It would be easy to dismiss this violation as a matter of no harm, no foul. After all, this appears simple (albeit shocking) negligence by the Biden administration as opposed to some nefarious effort. Yet, if true, billions of dollars in grants and thousands of personnel and policy changes could be questioned.
Last September, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected claims that appointment violations were mere technical concerns. It stressed in Cody v. Kijikazi that such a “violation is thus no mere technicality or quaint formality — it weakens our constitutional design. An appointment too far removed from the President or the head of an executive agency may, for example, erode political accountability.”
In addition, there is the question of the legal status of myriad decisions made by these directors, including exercising their authority over the approval of grants. If the administration failed to satisfy federal law, directors like Fauci would have had no more authority than his chief antagonist, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), to issue NIAID grants. Billions were awarded, policies changed, and personnel managed by individuals who potentially had lost their legal authority to direct these offices.
In one case involving challenged administrative law judges in 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Lucia v. Securities & Exchange Commission that past litigants were entitled to decisions from properly appointed judges.
Biden officials may have dismissed such obligations, but Congress clearly supported this requirement as an effort to gain greater accountability for these appointments. Executive officials do not have the authority to dismiss federal law any more than they have the authority to act without meeting the conditions to hold their positions under federal law.
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Mr. Trump's behavior has invalidated pretty much all rules and all laws.
Since he might have done something wrong, all rules are off for everyone else, forever.
@Copper said in Did those guys really quit?:
Mr. Trump's behavior has invalidated pretty much all rules and all laws.
Since he might have done something wrong, all rules are off for everyone else, forever.
Normal human social dynamics. Jonathan Haidt wrote a book on the subject, called "The Righteous Mind". The most dangerous thing in nature are righteous humans in groups.
