Biden Administration Quietly Maneuvering to Recommend Americans Give Up Drinking, House Republicans Claim

The Biden administration is maneuvering behind the scenes to ensure that the federal government abandons its current alcohol-intake recommendations in favor of a teetotaling approach that would have Americans abandon drinking altogether, House Republicans allege in a new letter to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

The Biden administration is violating federal law by delegating responsibility for the development of alcohol-intake guidelines to a subagency of HHS, rather than to the secretary himself, as part of a plan to get the government to recommend Americans abstain from alcohol, House Oversight committee chairman James Comer argues in a Thursday letter to Becerra, obtained exclusively by National Review.

Under the 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act and the National Nutrition Monitoring Act, dietary guidelines are required to be “based on the preponderance of the scientific and medical knowledge which is current at the time the report is prepared”—and must be approved by the HHS secretary — not a subagency.

But while Congress set aside $1.3 million for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to study the relationship between alcohol consumption and poor health outcomes to inform the creation of the upcoming dietary guidelines, it appears NASEM has wrongfully delegated its responsibility to a committee led by Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD).

In April 2022, HHS published notice in the Federal Register of the scientific questions to be considered by the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, none of which included questions related to health outcomes and the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

“By removing alcohol recommendations from the 2025 Dietary Guidelines, HHS appears to be driving toward approving Dietary Guidelines that by default recommend that Americans consume no alcohol whatsoever, despite a continually evolving scientific debate about the risks and benefits of moderate alcohol consumption,” Comer writes.

“As HHS works towards finalizing the 2025 Dietary Guidelines, it is imperative that the NASEM Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health complete its work as mandated by Congress without interference or efforts to subvert it by HHS or other government agencies.”

Reached for comment, an HHS spokesperson told National Review the agency has “received the letter and will work to respond to the Chairman directly.”

The oversight comes months after the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) suggested the U.S. could soon advise Americans to limit their alcohol consumption to no more than two drinks per week.

The agency currently recommends that men drink no more than two drinks per day and that women stick to just one drink per day. The U.S. recommendations will come up for review in 2025, and NIAAA director George Koob tells the Daily Mail the agency may change its current guidelines to more closely reflect Canada’s stricter guidelines, which recommend just two drinks per week.

Koob, who said he drinks a couple of glasses of wine per week, said he is keeping an eye on the Canadians’ “big experiment” with interest. 

“If there’s health benefits, I think people will start to re-evaluate where we’re at,” Koob said.

He said he is “pretty sure” the American recommendations will not increase as there are “no benefits” to physical health from drinking alcohol.

“So, if [alcohol consumption guidelines] go in any direction, it would be toward Canada,” Koob said.

The NIAAA currently defines heavy drinking for men as consuming more than four drinks in one day, or more than 14 drinks per week, whereas heavy drinking for women is defined as consuming more than three drinks in one day, or more than seven drinks per week.

Congress tasked NASEM with completing an alcohol review after the DGAC failed to complete its own alcohol review ahead of the 2020 dietary guidelines. The DGAC only answered one one research question regarding the relationship between alcohol use and all-cause mortality.

Now, HHS’s decision to study the impacts of alcohol intake on health is “duplicating—and may intend to undermine—the congressionally mandated effort already being carried out by NASEM.”

This after a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that HHS should collaborate better on the formulation of the dietary guidelines to reduce duplicative research activities.

The letter concludes by asking HHS to approve a staff-level briefing by April 11 on the scope of ICCPUD’s Subcommittee for Alcohol Intake and Health, including specific topics and questions being studied and how those topics overlap with the charge of the NASEM review of evidence on alcohol and health.

The letter goes on to request relevant documents and information dating back to December 29, 2022, involving communications between HHS staff related to agency compliance with applicable rules and regulations governing the formulation of the dietary guidelines. The committee also requests all documents and communications among or between HHS staff related to the formation of the ICCPUD Subcommittee for Alcohol Intake and Health to review alcohol consumption and health for the 2025 dietary guidelines.

The committee requests a complete list of all participants in the ICCPUD subcommittee for alcohol intake and health, and any documents or communications containing meeting minutes or other notes of the subcommittee’s meetings. Finally, it asks for all documents and communications “reflecting HHS and its subagencies’ efforts to undermine, subvert, or displace NASEM’s work and its role in the process for setting the 2025 Dietary Guidelines.”

In a separate letter to NASEM, Comer says it is “imperative that the NASEM Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health completes its work as mandated by Congress and resist interference by other government agencies in this process.”

Comer requests a staff-level briefing in which staffers from NASEM should be prepared to provide a status update on the agency’s progress towards answering the eight research questions related to alcohol consumption and individual health outcomes that were published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and HHS.

The letter also asks for documents and communications related to, among other things, expenditures and planned spending of the $1.3 million Congress earmarked for the alcohol research, and any communications among NASEM staff of members about or with HHS or USDA “related to committee members’ disclosures and alleged conflicts of interest or bias or reflecting attempts by HHS or USDA to affect, influence or interfere with NASEM’s work on the Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health.”

Comer separately asks the USDA to provide its own staff-level briefing to discuss, among other things, the potential impacts that any changes to the alcohol-related dietary guidelines would have on the U.S. agricultural sector. The committee also asks USDA to explain how it “intends to support the NASEM Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health and consider its findings for the 2025 Dietary Guidelines.”