NIH Blows $1.3 Billion On Failed Children's Health Study

Government Waste: The good news is the National Institutes of Health pulled the plug on a national children's health study because it was fatally flawed. The bad news is they wasted 10 years and $1.3 billion before they admitted it.

Congress mandated the National Children's Study as part of the Children's Health Act of 2000. The idea was to follow 100,000 newborns across the nation — in places ranging from urban California to the Florida swamps — until they turned 21, and measure how environmental and other factors affected their health.

Yet for the past 14 years, all the NIH managed to do was spend $1.3 billion figuring out how to conduct the massive effort and running some pilot experiments. The actual study wasn't scheduled to start officially until some time next year.

As with so many other failed government projects, red flags emerged early enough that, if heeded, would have spared taxpayers plenty of wasted money.

President Bush repeatedly tried to cancel the project, only to have Congress turn around and fully fund it.

When the National Academy of Sciences looked at the NCS in 2008, it found serious problems with the feasibility and management of the project. And in 2009, the Senate accused NCS officials of knowingly low-balling its costs, and ousted its director.

In early 2012, the NIH decided to overhaul the project after it "had come to see the study as unsustainable," according to an article in Nature that year. These changes prompted two advisory committee members to resign, saying the study's scientific value had been undermined.

Yet the NCS lumbered on until this summer when, after a second unflattering National Academy of Sciences review, the NIH decided to put the project on hold and set up a working group to figure out whether it should continue.

The working group's findings were devastating . The study, it said, wouldn't provide useful insights into how environmental factors influence health — in other words, it would fail at its primary objective. It also found that the sampling system was "overly complex," and the study's design was still "incomplete even after years of effort."

In short, the working group said, the NCS "is not feasible." And with that, NIH Director Francis Collins pulled the plug, flushing the $1.3 billion down the drain.

Bad as this is, at least the NIH could claim the money could have produced something worthwhile. That can't be said of the $349 million NASA wasted on a tower in Mississippi to test the J-2X rocket, which was going to take Americans back to the moon.

The tower was supposed to cost just $119 million, and NASA originally set a completion date of 2010. But when 2010 rolled around, the tower was nowhere near finished, and that year President Obama scrapped the whole return-to-the-moon plan along with the J-2X rocket. But work on the tower went on, until NASA completed it this June.

Then, "as soon as the work was done, (NASA) shut the tower down," noted the Washington Post. "The project was officially 'mothballed' — closed up and left empty — without ever being used."

Even more comical, NASA will have to spend $700,000 a year to maintain this fantastic monument to government waste.

So the next time someone bemoans some proposed cuts in federal spending, remember stories such as these.