Thirty senators have given the Department of Health and Human Services until Aug. 25 to explain how it selected roughly 150 health services research grants for cancellation, and to produce any written criteria, rankings, or analyses used to make those decisions.
The dispute is narrower and more concrete than the usual argument about federal spending priorities. It is about whether an executive agency may decline to spend money appropriated by Congress and whether the agency documented a basis for terminating specific awards. HHS has not publicly released selection criteria.
