talk about igs they are key to us knowing what is going on the government accountability office is key i could not work in the senate without the congressional research service they are excellent so we have the tools s first of all there is not a grant that they put out that they dont follow up there is not a grant that they dont check to see if they are meeting the requirements of the grant that was submitted they have one hundred percent follow up consequently the expectation has changed in terms of museums and libraries that if you get a grant from the federal government you had better perform in other words they have created the expectation we dont even hardly look at them anymore because werfel talked about www usaspending gov myself and president obama were the authors of that they are basically in violation of that bill because they were supposed to have sub grants and sub contractors on that at this time and they have chosen not to put the resources in to get there but if we had sub grantees and sub contractors on it you could actually find them you can search that site by anything it is like a google site you put in the name fish and you will see every penny we spend on fish grant process who is getting the money and for what it is not just to look at the money but to look at what is being done with it to see if it is really a purpose that we intend as you noted my statement will be made part of the record so i will be very brief let me talk about the national science foundation i am a big supporter of nsf they do key legitimate government work with a priority to keep us ahead of the curve but even the agencies that i love are wasteful what we did was a report and you cant really reflect that on the present management because the present director has only been there six months so this report that we put forward actually reflects what happened before he got there but we had some pretty significant findings when grants arent utilized you are supposed to give the money back we found one dollar seventy cents billion in money that should be and getting rid of it we also found a significant amount of low priority projects which means they werent paying attention there was an eighty thousand dollars study on why the same teams dominate march madness well the same teams dont dominate it so the  trendy baby names as a scientist i have trouble finding out how that as a country and especially in a constricted budget environment is going to help us what is the positive thing that is going to come out of that research maybe adult relationships and five hundred and eighty one thousand dollars to study whether online dating users are racist in their dating habits maybe there is value in those but the point is that it is all about priorities  that in a lot of grants you are not seeing priorities is because we are not looking for them we are not holding the agencies accountable here is a mission statement here is what we are supposed to be doing and then they kind of get off track the reason they can get off track is because they are not before the congress every year with somebody going over their grants with them aggressive oversight is one of the most important things we can do it doesnt mean we are right about our assessment of what they are doing but knowing that they have to come before us and explain their grants will limit a lot of questionable grants that go out there for things that dont have great cost benefit analyses to them we found significant fraud and inappropriate expenditures at the national science foundation we also found significantly poor contracting practices let me comment on something the other panel said there shouldnt be other than in rare instances any grant that isnt competitive there should not be any accomplished we will have blown fifty percent of our it budget and we do it every year we blow it because of the way we contract and the way we oversee it there is a lot of money that we can spend more wisely and also get greater value for the american public if we make sure one that we competitively bid all of these things and two that we know what we want before we contract that is a big problem in the defense department it is a big problem in the large agencies they dont know what they want and they write a contract anyway what they should be doing is waiting until they figure it out or creating a research only contract to say what is it that we want it is a giant problem that has one hundred dollars billion a year worth of waste in the federal government dollars million went to contracts permitting advanced payments to just three groups none of these contractors had an approved disclosure statement so what happened was the agency couldnt identify or document the actual costs which is a problem contract at the beginning in other words they didnt do it right at the beginning then when they found that they couldnt get what they wanted they didnt have the tools to find out whether or not they got good value because they couldnt get the information  fifteen federal departments and twelve independent agencies we are all interested in education we are interested in getting more scientists more technologists more engineers and more math well we now have in the federal government one hundred and five science technology engineering and math programs twenty eight of them are coming through the national science foundation at a cost of one dollar twenty cents billion none of them are cross referenced to see if they are duplicating anything else that the rest of the federal government is doing not one of them has a metric on it as to whether or not it is accomplishing the purpose so the whole idea is when you begin to look at grants then you start looking at a bigger area we need to focus down and put somebody in charge of science technology couple of things off you just for additional information let me start with the last statement you were making about duplication a lot of the stories we have heard and we have seen some of the reports that are coming out on it how do you get there how do you actually start combining those i understand that legislatively we ultimately have the responsibility but we are talking about killing one program and moving what we did with the last debt limit was we went to gao and crs and we asked them this question we would like a list of all the programs in the federal government they both told us to take a hike there is no way you can do it both of them did  i understand that it is a massive project there is only one agency that lists all of their programs that is the department of education you can go to any head of any agency and they cant tell you all of their programs they dont even have them written down programs just so they know what they are and so we can know what they are the problem is so big and so massive that you have to start by knowing what the programs are last year two times in one other committee and i wont name which committee we had members of the senate offer amendments to do well intentioned things without knowing that we already had a program and a department doing exactly what they were writing already and exactly  of course the amendment was withdrawn when they were made aware of that but the fact is that most of us as members of the congress arent aware so you have to aggressively pursue it mister lankford we had been working on that on this committee as well looking for areas just to get disclosure out there in the public even to have a website that lists not only the agency but all the programs that are within that agency then anyone can get a chance to look and see where their dollars are spent what programs are available and how much goes into that program as well as how many staff are dedicated to that it gives people a basic look let me ask you a question about some of these grant programs that you mentioned before that are coming up like developing a relationship through farmville i dont remember a bill that was related to that how do grants like that come into existence senator coburn well it is because we lazy legislators what we decide is we will pass a bill and grant maximum flexibility to the bureaucracy in fact we are transferring our own authority as congress to the bureaucracy i just came from a hearing in the senate on regulations regulations are killing our country that is not partisan it was happening under the bush administration it is happening a little more now it is more important now because we are in the midst of a slow economic time and we need the regulations to go down so business can  grow but when we give up our responsibility to actually direct the agency specifically in terms of what we intend that is how you get that we do that because one we are not thorough and two a lot of times we dont know what we want when we write a piece of legislation that should be a caution to us if you dont know what you want you are not any different than the agency that is passing a grant out there you need to know what you want before you write it what you intend and what you expect then you need to follow up when was the last time every agency in the federal government was overseen with five hundred and thirty five members of congress we could do that every two years if we would do it you know what we would see a marked change and shedding some light on research and grant funding let me just share with you concerns though i have maybe on the other side i heard you say that you thought all of these grants ideally ought to be competitively bid respectfully i guess i would want to see the ability of the federal government in awarding research and development grants preserved i would remind us of the fact that for example the successful crash effort to make sure the united states had the atom bomb before the nazis was not competitively bid i spent twenty years of my life in the private sector for organizations that did  have got that expertise we want to fund that because that can develop something that is going to help our economy or help medicine or whatever it may be so this is just a word of caution i think you are right and i am not unsympathetic with the idea that by and large we ought to have a really good reason why something isn bid but to go to a rigid formula where everything is competitively bid especially in the research field i think could be risky frankly and could choke innovation unwittingly senator coburn let me respond to that  at risk is because we had cost plus contracting on the research and development and no capital risk exposure by those companies that were involved in it human nature is contract managers we are short on them and we are short on experienced contract managers there is great wisdom in them because they have the experience and they have known these businesses they know who can actually do what so i tell you that is the first thing the second thing i more reticent to pull the plug on it i think you could address all of those three i agree with you if we have a unique level of expertise but i would tell you if there are two of them that have that level of expertise we ought to have them compete if there is nobody that has that level of expertise then i am fine  would like to make if i can and you did not do this i dont mean to imply you did but one of the things that sometimes concerns me is that in the political arena we make fun of research i can remember in my campaign last year my opponent there is one that came up recently mister chairman in the science and technology committee the golden fleece award which was issued by a democrat from wisconsin at the time was given to an odd sounding study called the sexual behavior of the screw worm fly d the cattle industry profits by twenty dollars billion and lowered the cost of beef at the supermarket by five percent other than that yes it was a frivolous piece of federal research so it is easy to demagogue research sometimes especially with the public not spending time on research directly i would hope that all of us in the political arena would show a little bit more respect for what we are trying to do as you say senator coburn no i agree we dont know the depths and the intents but that is the other thing that ought to be put in the grant what are we trying to the pine beetle out west right now if we would have had good research on hurting its reproductive capability we wouldnt have half the forests in colorado and wyoming turning brown right now look i am a two time cancer survivor i