By Andrew Kerr
Two foreign nonprofit groups with close ties to high-ranking Biden administration officials are poised to receive a combined $790 million from the president’s fiscal year 2023 budget, raising conflict of interest concerns from a watchdog group and a member of Congress.
© Patrick Semansky/APPresident Joe Biden speaks about his infrastructure agenda at the New Hampshire Port Authority in Portsmouth, N.H., Tuesday, April 19, 2022.
The White House announced on March 28 that it will commit $500 million from President Joe Biden’s budget to the Norway-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to support affordable COVID-19 vaccine development. Unmentioned in the announcement is that a key Health and Human Services official in charge of coordinating the agency’s COVID-19 response, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Dawn O’Connell, served as CEPI’s U.S. director just before she joined the Biden administration.
As a CEPI director from 2017 through January 2021, O’Connell was responsible for managing the group’s relationship with government entities in the United States, the White House said in a March 2021 press release.
Rep. Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican, said he was alarmed to learn the Biden administration intends to dole out $500 million to O’Connell’s immediate former employer.
“I was alarmed, but not surprised, to find out that the Biden Administration’s budget request included a line item for a half billion dollars to line the pockets of their cronies and foreign organizations in the name of ‘vaccine development’ and ‘pandemic preparedness,'” Davis told the Washington Examiner.
“Supply chains are in crisis, inflation is through the roof, and the public has largely returned to normal life as it relates to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the Biden Administration’s only concern appears to be finding a way to give their friends and former employers a ride on the COVID Gravy Train,” Davis added. “Pandemic preparedness should be something the United States does a better job of in the future, but we deserve to know why this Administration is directing hundreds of millions of dollars on a non-competitive basis to organizations with such concerning conflicts of interest.”
An HHS spokesperson said O’Connell is recused from matters involving CEPI through Jan. 20, 2023.
“Dawn O’Connell is recused from particular matters involving specific parties in which CEPI is or represents a party. That recusal obligation lasts for two years from her date of appointment, which was January 20, 2021,” the spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
However, the White House did not provide an answer when asked if O’Connell had any involvement in the administration’s decision to commit $500 million to her former employer.
“Budget decisions undergo a robust, months-long interagency review process, and are not made by any one individual,” White House deputy press secretary Chris Meagher told the Washington Examiner.
A second foreign nonprofit group that received a $290 million commitment from the White House also shares close ties to a senior Biden administration official.
Natasha Bilimoria, the deputy assistant administrator at the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, worked as the U.S. director of the Switzerland-based nonprofit group known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, before she joined the Biden administration in 2021.
In that capacity, Bilimoria served as Gavi’s senior-most executive and spokesperson in the U.S., and she played a key role in securing a $4 billion congressional appropriation for the group in December 2020 to help fund its COVID-19 vaccine activities.
USAID granted Bilimoria an ethics waiver just weeks after she joined the Biden administration that authorized her to participate in official COVID-19 matters involving her former employer.
“Ms. Bilimoria must be able to participate in matters related to Gavi exclusively with respect to the COVID-19 response in order to effectively advance the Agency’s oversite [sic],” Bilimoria’s ethics waiver stated.
The White House said in an April 7 statement that it had committed $290 million from Biden’s budget to Gavi “to reach children with cost-effective vaccines to accelerate progress towards preventing child deaths.”
USAID did not return a request for comment.
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Protect the Public’s Trust, a federal watchdog group, said in a statement the noncompetitive nature of the Biden administration’s plans to earmark funds to CEPI and Gavi deserve scrutiny by congressional and federal investigators.
“The Gavi/Bilimoria and CEPI/O’Connell fact patterns are the exact types of scenarios that gave rise to four alarm fires in the previous administration,” PPT director Michael Chamberlain, a former Trump administration official, said in the statement. “But, in this case, they appear to have been met with mild applause by supporters and crickets among good government groups that were once laser-focused on even the most tangential threads that could create a potential conflict of interest. The double-standard that exists is a major reason for the American public’s lack of trust in its government.”