News

By James Tillman

October 7, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) has had a sixfold increase in employee misconduct evaluations, often involving the access of pornography from government computers, according to a new report by the Washington Times.

The NSF is an independent federal agency created by Congress to “promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; to secure the national defense,” according to its own website.  It has a budget of approximately 6 billion dollars, much of which is used in grants given to promote scientific research.

The pornography problems at the NSF have been so severe in recent years, however, that they overwhelmed the agency's inspector general and forced it to pull back from its mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent money and to instead attempt to police the behavior of the NSF's own employees.

One senior executive spent at least 331 days looking at pornography without being detected, according to records obtained by the Times.  The cost of this behavior to taxpayers was estimated as between $13,800 and $58,000 dollars.  The executive reportedly offered as an excuse for his behavior a humanitarian concern: pornography sites help young women from poor countries make money to help their parents.

Leslie Paige, of Citizens Against Government Waste, blasted the NSF: “What kind of oversight is there when they have to shift people from looking at grant fraud to watch for people looking at pornography?”

The problem surfaced when the foundation's inspector general's office published some summaries of recent cases; Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, then launched an inquiry into the problem.

There are a total of 12,000 employees in the NSF.  Documents do not show how many employee misconduct evaluations are pending.