Hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars went to recipients in China and Russia in recent years without being properly tracked by the federal government, including a grant that enabled a state-run Russian lab to test cats on treadmills, according to Sen. Joni Ernst.
Ernst and her staff investigators, working with auditors at the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service, as well as two nonprofit Washington watchdogs-Open The Books and the White Coat Waste Project-discovered dozens of other grants that weren't counted on the federal government's USASpending.
Among the newly discovered grants is $4.2 million to China's infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology "To conduct dangerous experiments on bat coronaviruses and transgenic mice," according to a May 31 Ernst statement provided to The Epoch Times.
The $4.2 million exposed by Ernst is in addition to previously reported funding to the WIV for extensive gain-of-function research by Chinese scientists, much of it funded in whole or part prior to the COVID-19 pandemic by National Institutes for Health grants channeled through the EcoHealth Alliance medical research nonprofit.
"These countryside dogs in China are part of the farmer's household; they were mainly used for guarding. Their diet includes boiled rice, discarded raw food animal tissues, and whatever dogs can forage. These dogs were sold for food," an NIH study uncovered by the Ernst researchers reads.
Ernst and Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, are introducing legislation to require federal officials to go much deeper in tracking funding going to Russian and Chinese recipients.
Their Tracking Receipts to Adversarial Countries for Knowledge of Spending Act will require every penny from a government grant paid to any organization in China and Russia to be tracked and publicly disclosed.
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