Congress should commission a General Accounting
Office audit of the National Institutes of Health grant system, also
correlating research contracts data, to examine the issue of
duplication within the system.
The NIH grant approval system, on the agency level,
as well as the facility level, must be overhauled to put more
community representation on Institutional Animal Care & Use Committees
(IACUC) for all facilities that receive NIH funding, and all IACUC
meetings must be open to the public.
The CRISP system must be overhauled so that all
grant abstracts include a full abstract, funding amount, species
names, etc. This will allow for a higher degree of accountability
within the NIH.
Specific limits must be developed to prevent
excessive duplication and redundancy within the NIH system.
All branches of the federal government that perform
animal-based experimentation should be required to maintain an
internet accessible database of all funded projects to prevent
inter-agency project duplication.
