House Republicans are engaged in an escalating fight with the Biden-Harris administration about dietary guidelines for alcohol consumption, which could become a renewed priority after Congress's summer recess.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services Chairwoman Lisa McClain (R-MI) sent their eighth letter to the departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services on Thursday in a five-month feud regarding oversight of research on the health consequences of alcohol consumption.
The health benefits and consequences of alcohol have been hotly debated in medicine for decades, with public health officials trending in recent years toward dissuading the public from drinking at all.
But when the 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a list of nonbinding diet recommendations from USDA and HHS, made very few specific recommendations on alcohol’s relationship to chronic health conditions, Congress allocated $1.3 million to the study of alcohol-related mortality.
Congress specifically allocated those funds to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine as part of the 2024 budget to conduct an impartial and thorough investigation into the negative and positive health effects of moderate alcohol consumption for adults.
House Republicans became concerned, however, in January when the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking under HHS announced that it would be using the $1.3 million for studies, not NASEM.
The ICCPUD, which has a congressional mandate to study youth drinking patterns, is a part of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the HHS agency dedicated to substance abuse and mental health, not chronic physiological disorders such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.
Comer, a strong advocate of the Kentucky bourbon industry, and McClain wrote to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in April that his agency's decision to delegate the alcohol impact studies to ICCPUD “may intend to undermine” Congress’s goal of impartially examining the health effects of alcohol.
The Republican leaders also noted in their initial inquiry that preliminary drafts of the scientific questions to be addressed in the 2025 dietary guidelines had no questions related to the health outcomes of alcohol consumption.
McClain and Comer said in April that removing such questions from the survey may make it “by default recommend that Americans consume no alcohol whatsoever, despite a continually evolving scientific debate about the risks and benefits of moderate alcohol consumption.”
The 2020 Dietary Guidelines do urge people not to start drinking in the brief one-page reference to alcohol in the 164-page document, cutting the advisable daily number of drinks to two for men and one for women.
“The Dietary Guidelines does not recommend that individuals who do not drink alcohol start drinking for any reason,” the guidelines read. “Evidence indicates that, among those who drink, higher average alcohol consumption is associated with an increased risk of death from all causes compared with lower average alcohol consumption.”
Although the USDA and HHS dietary guidelines do not have the effect of law, federal campaigns against drinking arguably have had an effect, especially on younger generations.
Over the past 20 years, young adults have consistently been drinking less, with only 62% of those aged 18 to 34 ever having consumed an alcoholic beverage, compared to 72% at the beginning of the millennium.
According to Gallup, young adults who do drink alcohol are drinking less in quantity as well, with the average number of drinks per week dropping from 5.2 to 3.6 for adults under 34.
People over the age of 55, however, have become increasingly likely to drink, causing the national average drinking numbers to hold steady.
Although the committee’s initial concerns involved HHS superseding its authority by moving a project to a different subagency potentially for ideological reasons, the back-and-forth has since become one more example, Republicans say, of HHS’s lack of transparency with congressional investigations.
Since the Oversight investigation began this spring, the USDA has only provided 46 pages of documents responding to the committee’s eight separate requests for information. HHS has only provided 20 pages.
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“The Committee has been patient, but after five months, HHS is failing to meaningfully cooperate with the Committee’s oversight,” Comer and McClain wrote to Becerra on Thursday. The pair conveyed the same sentiment to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack.
Comer and McClain gave both HHS and the USDA until Sept. 19 to substantively respond to the committee’s request for documents before leadership would consider the compulsory process.
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