The leaders of the House committee that investigated steroid use in baseball reached out Thursday to the leaders of the NFL, its players union and the United States Anti-Doping Agency (ADA) to broker a meeting about the league's stalled testing program for human growth hormone (HGH). Representatives Darrell Issa, the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Elijah E. Cummings, the committee's ranking Democrat, plan to discuss the initiation of HGH testing in the league. The meeting would be closed to the public. “We believe the league and its players remain best positioned to implement an HGH testing regime, but concerns have been raised about the status of these efforts,” Issa, a California Republican, and Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, said in a statement. They added that the purpose of the meeting was to understand the concerns of the league and the union regarding HGH testing and to “strongly convey our universal interest in protecting the health of millions of younger athletes across the country.” A copy of the letter, which was addressed to Commissioner Roger Goodell, the union executive director DeMaurice Smith and Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the antidoping agency, was obtained by The New York Times Thursday. Greg Aiello, an NFL spokesman, confirmed receipt of the letter and said that the league appreciated the committee's interest and looked forward to working with it. A union spokesman was not aware of the invitation. HGH, which is said to increase lean muscle mass, decrease fat and hasten recovery, is illegal to possess in the United States without a prescription. The test for it has been used in the Olympics since 2004. The NFL and the union had conditionally agreed to put HGH testing in place when they signed a new collective bargaining agreement last month and hoped to start testing by the season opener three weeks ago. But talks about the testing have stalled, with the union refusing to move forward until it receives more scientific documents from the World Anti-Doping Agency about the test and its validity. The union blames the league for what it called “intellectual laziness” for not independently researching the accuracy of the test, which has been used by the World Anti-Doping Agency since 2004. The union is also demanding documents from the agency that it says will allow it to evaluate the test independently. WADA, meanwhile, said there was no chance it would share those documents. __
