WASHINGTON — The director of one of the government's largest health agencies apologized Wednesday for misleading Congress about how scientists spent some money earmarked to fight deadly hantavirus. But he insisted the diverted funds were well-spent to fight other killer viruses.
The apology by Jeffrey Koplan, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is his second. In October when he acknowledged the CDC misspent about half of the $22.7 million it had received from Congress to study chronic fatigue syndrome.
In the latest case, some of the $7.5 million that Congress intended to help fight hantavirus each year was spent by the CDC to investigate other outbreaks of mysterious killers, Koplan said.
Among the outbreaks Koplan cited included the CDC's investigation last summer of the Nipah virus that killed more than 100 people in Malaysia, an outbreak spread by pigs that experts feared could have quickly spread around the globe if not stemmed.
That is not to say that continuing to investigate hantavirus is not important, Koplan said. The disease first appeared as a frightening 1993 outbreak, when otherwise healthy adults suddenly began suffocating from a disease that filled their lungs with fluid. CDC "disease detectives" quickly discovered the culprit was a never-before-seen strain of hantavirus spread by a type of mouse, and worked to stem the outbreak.
Hantavirus still does strike; it sickened 24 people last year.
But the CDC lacks the emergency funds to cover outbreaks of the Ebola virus and numerous other mysterious killers that it is called upon to investigate around the world, and thus must sometimes juggle spending on continuing studies of one disease to cover a crisis, Koplan said.
"The money was spent on very important public health issues," he stressed, noting that fighting mysterious outbreaks in other countries helps keep some killers from entering the United States.
The problem is that CDC employees then filed budget documents with Congress that did not acknowledge a yet-to-be-determined amount of the $7.5 million in hantavirus funding was spent elsewhere, he said Wednesday after The Washington Post disclosed the funding discrepancy.
The lawmaker who oversees CDC spending said Wednesday that misleading Congress about how taxpayer money is spent is a serious charge.
Congress never told CDC it had to spend all $7.5 million each year on hantavirus, said Rep. John Porter, R-Ill., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds CDC.
"We have no problem at all with their doing something they think is more important with the money than we might think is important. That's scientific judgment," Porter said.
But he has ordered Koplan and the CDC employees responsible for the budget reports to Congress to appear at a hearing next week to explain.
"They have basically not communicated the truth to us," Porter said. "This is the second time in a very short period of time we find the money has been spent in ways other they represented it was being spent."
He said it is important to uncover "if we don't have an agency that is going to tell Congress the truth."
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Wednesday the Justice Department should launch a criminal investigation of CDC's budget practices.
Koplan said CDC employees did not intend to mislead Congress, but that as the agency's budget grew, its accounting practices got sloppy. He began investigating CDC accounting practices in wake of the chronic fatigue issue, and said he recently sent budget documents to Congress to begin clarifying how the hantavirus money was spent.
"I'm not saying that's an excuse for not having done it sooner," he said. But "I apologize for our not having informed Congress quickly about the way we were using those funds."