The study was commissioned under the Biden administration and published without government approval, the Oversight Committee says.
A government contractor behind a study aimed at pushing Health and Human Services to approve alcohol-intake recommendations that would have Americans abandon drinking altogether later improperly published its “biased” findings in a medical journal — without permission — in an effort to force the Trump administration to adopt its preferred guidelines, according to the House Oversight Committee.
The committee has been investigating the development of alcohol consumption guidelines for the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, including a study on alcohol intake and health commissioned under the Biden Administration by the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD), convened by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) within HHS.
As the committee previously revealed in January, the Biden administration had a “pre-determined goal” in commissioning the study: “to publish a biased study that concluded, following the aforementioned ‘Canadian model,’ that no amount of alcohol consumption is safe.”
The committee has alleged the Biden administration recruited scientists it was sure would develop research to support that conclusion, and ultimately planned to use the results of the study to influence the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines.
The study “was . . . fraught with bias” and staffed solely with “anti-alcohol advocates who had conducted previous research linking negative health outcomes with alcohol,” the committee says.
SAMSHA contracted with Synergy Enterprises, Inc. to complete the study. The contractor then reached agreements with a series of subcontractors to serve on a Scientific Review Panel (SRP) to conduct the study.
Shortly after the SRP submitted its draft report of the AIH study for public comment in January 2025, it was disbanded by the Trump administration.
But despite the “flawed” study having never reached the final stage, BMJ Open published a protocol report, authored by members of the SRP, in November 2025 containing extensive information and data that appears to have been obtained through the SRP’s contracted work on the AIH study, writes Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) in a new letter to the Department of Human Health and Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., obtained exclusively by National Review.
The SRP members later followed up by publishing, on June 8, 2026, what “appears to be the last completed draft of the AIH study in an outside scientific journal, apparently without authorization, concluding that the Dietary Guidelines should be revised to reflect the findings of that same draft of the AIH study,” the committee says.
SAMSHA’s lead contracting officer for the AIH study also published an accompanying op-ed with a section entitled “A call to action.”
“This publication and the simultaneously published op-ed made clear that the authors publishing the final AIH study intended for their publication to support broader demands on how agencies make staffing decisions and how policymakers utilize scientific studies and calculate policy decisions,” the letter says.
The committee believes Synergy and its subcontractors (the members of the AIH study’s SRP) published a report on the study’s protocol in a non-government medical journal, using “extensive information and data likely obtained through the AIH study” without authorization, in violation of their contract with the federal government. That contract “clearly specifies that all information and data derived from the work done under the AIH study is government property,” according to the committee.
“No information developed under this contract shall be released by the contractor without written permission of the government,” SAMSHA’s contract with Synergy stated.
Meanwhile, each of the subcontractors’ consulting agreements with Synergy contained a provision that said, “CONSULTANT must request approval from the PRIME CONTRACTOR/GOVERNMENT prior to publishing, presenting, or using any results arising out of the performance of this Agreement for their own instructional, research, or publication objectives.”
Comer writes that the committee is “not aware of any evidence that such approval was ever requested by the subcontractors.”
In his new letter to Kennedy, Comer asks HHS for a staff-level briefing before October 1, and for the agency to prepare for the briefing by reviewing “the actions of Synergy Enterprises, Inc. and the individual SRP members and take any appropriate remedial, disciplinary, contractual, or legal action in response, including but not limited to debarment of the prime contractor and the subcontractors.”
As National Review previously reported, the committee first began investigating the alcohol intake study under the Biden administration due to concerns officials were violating federal law by delegating responsibility for the development of alcohol-intake guidelines to a subagency of HHS, rather than to the then-HHS secretary himself, Xavier Becerra, as part of a plan to get the government to recommend Americans abstain from alcohol.
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, NASEM wrongfully delegated its responsibility to the committee led by SAMHSA and ICCPUD.
The 2020-2025 dietary guidelines set moderate drinking limits at two drinks or less a day for men and one drink or less a day for women. The government ultimately published its 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans without a specific numerical recommendation, suggesting instead to “consume less alcohol for better overall health.”
At the time the guidelines were released, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, told reporters that the greater health risk is isolation, not alcohol. Alcohol is the “social lubricant that brings people together,” he said, adding “there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way.”
In terms of specific alcohol limits, he said, “there is alcohol on these dietary guidelines, but the implication is don’t have it for breakfast.”