WASHINGTON, DC — All right, you pervs at the National Science Foundation: The jig is up. You’ve pissed off Sen. Chuck Grassley [R-Iowa], and he’s gunning for your funding.Grassley, the powerful ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, reportedly was incensed when he discovered what he considers excessive attachment to online porn among NSF employees. The senator was tipped off to the scientists’ burning desires by verbiage buried deep within an otherwise innocuous section of a 68-page semiannual budget report from the NSF. The section indicated NSF staffers have dedicated a “significant number” of working hours to viewing, downloading and emailing internet porn illicitly.
On Tuesday, Grassley fired off a memo to the NSF, requesting all documentation relating to the porn surfing and the seven investigations into “Abuse of NSF IT Resources.”
“The semiannual report raises real questions about how the National Science Foundation manages its resources, and Congress ought to demand a full accounting before it gives the agency another $3 billion in the stimulus bill,” Grassley told Politico.com.
While there may be some validity to the notion that sex and sexuality are proper fields for scientific study and therefore internet porn is within the purview of the NSF, hardly anyone is willing to make that argument in the case of one “senior staffer” who reportedly spent as much as 20-percent of his workday “viewing sexually explicit images and engaging in sexually explicit online ‘chats’ with various women.” The cost of that employee’s transgressions in time lost: $58,000 of the agency’s $6.06 billion annual budget.
Since the discovery of Mr. Horny’s online escapades, several other NSF staff members have been outed for unseemly behavior at work. The NSF has installed filtering software in an effort to create a less erotically charged work atmosphere and address what it euphemistically refers to as an “adult entertainment problem.”
Grassley gave the agency until Thursday to turn over all “specific reports of investigations, audit reports, evaluations and information supporting the examination of the NSF network drive.” He intends to use the data to “ensure that NSF properly fulfills its mission to strengthen scientific and engineering research, and makes responsible use of the public funding provided for these research disciplines.”
So far, the NSF has declined to comment about the report or the senator’s request.
