Five U.S. Senators this week asked the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to disclose details about royalty payments made to NIH employees by third parties, including pharmaceutical companies, in a letter stating Americans deserve full transparency.

In a letter to Lawrence Tabak, acting director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the senators asked Tabak to disclose the amounts of royalty payments, who made the payments and the products or innovations for which the employees were paid.

This letter came after the nonprofit OpentheBooks reported the NIH, in response to the group's Freedom of Information Act request, provided the names of NIH employees who received royalty payments between 2009 and 2020, but redacted the amounts paid, and the companies or other entities that made the payments.

The group determined that between 2010 and 2020, more than $350 million in royalties were paid by third parties to the NIH and its scientists. Dr. Anthony Fauci received 23 royalty payments, but the NIH not did disclose the sum total of those payments.

The senators wrote in a press release that the NIH provided only the names of the employees receiving the payments and the number of payments they received between 2009 and 2014. The amounts of the payments, the innovations in question, and the names of the third-party payers were redacted.

The senators said the FOIA redactions contradict a previous NIH statement claiming an entity "would have to make a request via the Freedom of Information Act to find out royalty payments to individual researchers."

Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) signed the letter.