House hearing (118th Congress), PROTECTING AMERICAN TAXPAYERS: HIGHLIGHTING EFFORTS TO PROTECT AGAINST FEDERAL WASTE, FRAUD, AND MISMANAGEMENT (PDF)
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The printed record of an April 19, 2023 hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Serial No. 118–8, titled Protecting American Taxpayers: Highlighting Efforts to Protect Against Federal Waste, Fraud, and Mismanagement. It lists the committee under Chairman Frank Lucas and Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren, followed by a hearing charter. Opening statements come from Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight Chairman Jay Obernolte, Ranking Member Valerie Foushee and Ranking Member Lofgren. Witnesses include inspectors general Paul K. Martin of NASA, Allison C. Lerner of the National Science Foundation, Teri L. Donaldson of the Department of Energy and Eric J. Soskin.
Summary drafted by a model from the document's text below and checked by script against that text before publication. It is a navigation aid, not a reading of what the document proves. Where AI is used
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PROTECTING AMERICAN TAXPAYERS:
HIGHLIGHTING EFFORTS TO PROTECT
AGAINST FEDERAL WASTE, FRAUD,
AND MISMANAGEMENT
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE,
AND TECHNOLOGY
OF THE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
APRIL 19, 2023
Serial No. 118–8
Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
(
Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
51–794PDF WASHINGTON : 2024
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. FRANK LUCAS, Oklahoma, Chairman
BILL POSEY, Florida ZOE LOFGREN, California, Ranking Member
RANDY WEBER, Texas SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon
BRIAN BABIN, Texas HALEY STEVENS, Michigan
JIM BAIRD, Indiana JAMAAL BOWMAN, New York
DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida DEBORAH ROSS, North Carolina
MIKE GARCIA, California ERIC SORENSEN, Illinois
STEPHANIE BICE, Oklahoma ANDREA SALINAS, Oregon
JAY OBERNOLTE, California VALERIE FOUSHEE, North Carolina
CHUCK FLEISCHMANN, Tennessee KEVIN MULLIN, California
DARRELL ISSA, California JEFF JACKSON, North Carolina
RICK CRAWFORD, Arkansas EMILIA SYKES, Ohio
CLAUDIA TENNEY, New York MAXWELL FROST, Florida
RYAN ZINKE, Montana YADIRA CARAVEO, Colorado
SCOTT FRANKLIN, Florida SUMMER LEE, Pennsylvania
DALE STRONG, Alabama JENNIFER MCCLELLAN, Virginia
MAX MILLER, Ohio TED LIEU, California
RICH MCCORMICK, Georgia SEAN CASTEN, Illinois
MIKE COLLINS, Georgia PAUL TONKO, New York
BRANDON WILLIAMS, New York
TOM KEAN, New Jersey
VACANCY
(II)
C O N T E N T S
April 19, 2023
Page
Hearing Charter ...................................................................................................... 2
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Jay Obernolte, Chairman, Subcommittee on
Investigations and Oversight, Committee on Science, Space, and Tech-
nology, U.S. House of Representatives ............................................................... 15
Written Statement ............................................................................................ 16
Statement by Representative Valerie Foushee, Ranking Member, Sub-
committee on Investigations and Oversight, Committee on Science, Space,
and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ............................................... 17
Written Statement ............................................................................................ 18
Statement by Representative Zoe Lofgren, Ranking Member, Committee on
Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives ..................... 19
Written Statement ............................................................................................ 19
Witnesses:
The Honorable Paul K. Martin, Inspector General, National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA)
Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 20
Written Statement ............................................................................................ 23
The Honorable Allison C. Lerner, Inspector General, National Science Foun-
dation (NSF)
Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 33
Written Statement ............................................................................................ 35
The Honorable Teri L. Donaldson, Inspector General, Department of Energy
(DOE)
Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 51
Written Statement ............................................................................................ 53
The Honorable Eric J. Soskin, Inspector General, Department of Transpor-
tation (DOT)
Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 75
Written Statement ............................................................................................ 77
The Honorable Sean W. O’Donnell, Inspector General, Environmental Protec-
tion Agency (EPA)
Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 86
Written Statement ............................................................................................ 88
Discussion ................................................................................................................. 101
Appendix: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
The Honorable Paul K. Martin, Inspector General, National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) ............................................................................. 138
The Honorable Allison C. Lerner, Inspector General, National Science Foun-
dation (NSF) ......................................................................................................... 140
The Honorable Teri L. Donaldson, Inspector General, Department of Energy
(DOE) .................................................................................................................... 142
The Honorable Eric J. Soskin, Inspector General, Department of Transpor-
tation (DOT) ......................................................................................................... 143
(III)
PROTECTING AMERICAN TAXPAYERS:
HIGHLIGHTING EFFORTS TO PROTECT
AGAINST FEDERAL WASTE, FRAUD,
AND MISMANAGEMENT
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 2023
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY,
Washington, D.C.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room
2318, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Jay Obernolte pre-
siding.
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Mr. OBERNOLTE. The hour of 10 o’clock having arrived, this hear-
ing of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee is hereby con-
vened.
I’d like to begin today by thanking Chairman Lucas and Ranking
Member Lofgren for allowing both myself and Mrs. Foushee to lead
this Full Committee hearing. And I’m very excited about the topic
we’re going to be discussing today.
This hearing focuses on a topic of great importance both to me
and to this Committee, which is to review the oversight and inves-
tigative efforts of the Inspectors General (IGs) within each agency
within the jurisdiction of our Committee. The role of the OIG (Of-
fice of Inspector General) in these agencies is an essential one,
which is to protect the American taxpayer by working to identify
Federal waste, fraud, and mismanagement.
Inspectors General have a strong historical precedent in our Na-
tion. IGs are meant to be the watchdogs for Congress and the
American taxpayer. The independent oversight capability the IG
wields to expose waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement is their
core responsibility. It’s critical to the independence of Inspectors
General that this independence is maintained. IGs are meant to be
in their parent agencies, but not of their parent agencies, or frank-
ly, of any Administration. They’re meant to be apolitical and set
apart in order to do the hard task of publicly highlighting the flaws
of their parent agencies, and I know that that is not an easy one.
Helping to achieve transparency and accountability within an Ad-
ministration is a difficult but a very necessary role that the IG
leads.
Each agency has a very different mission and goal, which makes
it challenging to have a single, all-encompassing metric to evaluate
the effectiveness of each IG. I hope that this hearing will be an op-
portunity to discuss the potential metrics by which each Office of
the Inspector General should be measured and where those offices
currently stand.
This hearing is also a chance to highlight the important work
done by each of the offices here before us today. I’d particularly like
to highlight the oversight work surrounding the growing threat to
our cybersecurity and research integrity standards. The COVID–19
pandemic has pushed technologies forward and implemented re-
mote capabilities far sooner than any of us had anticipated. Hear-
ing from each of you today on the oversight efforts your agencies
have taken to enhance cybersecurity standards and promote re-
search integrity is particularly important to me. I hope that this
topic can be effectively discussed as it relates to the security of
passwords and protective internal practices of each of the agencies
that you represent. This is likely to be discussion for future hear-
ings as well. I certainly hope it will be. But I encourage conversa-
tions on this topic today.
Several of the agencies here today before us have received mil-
lions if not billions of Federal dollars to advance research and de-
velopment initiatives. Massive spending bills such as the Infra-
structure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and the
Inflation Reduction Act have recently become law, and have pro-
vided agencies with new statutory mandates, as well as research
and development funds to advance innovation in our country.
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However, more spending also means more opportunities for mis-
management of those taxpayer funds, making the IGs’ role more
important than ever. I’d like to hear how each IG has already
begun to provide oversight of these taxpayer funds, as well as fu-
ture oversight plans in these areas. It’s critical as new programs
and funds are implemented that every proper measure is taken to
safeguard them from fraud and abuse.
This hearing also serves as an opportunity for this Committee to
emphasize the various findings the IGs have reported on in areas
that have raised considerable concerns. Just a few issues we hope
to address here include the law enforcement presence and mitiga-
tion efforts of sexual assault and harassment allegations in the
Antarctic, the extent of work-from-home policies that are in place,
and various award and procurement issues as we move closer to
the congressional appropriations season.
At this time, I would like to welcome our esteemed witnesses and
thank you all for joining us. I’m looking forward to a robust discus-
sion with each of you. And I’m hopeful our conversation today will
highlight the good work being done in accountability and trans-
parency and hope it also strengthens your oversight and investiga-
tory efforts. So I thank you very much for being here.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Obernolte follows:]
Good morning. I would like to begin today by thanking Chairman Lucas and
Ranking Member Lofgren for allowing myself and Ms. Foushee to lead this full com-
mittee hearing.
Today’s hearing focuses on a topic of great importance to this committee: pro-
tecting the American taxpayer by working to expose federal waste, fraud, and mis-
management. Essentially, the role of the Office of Inspectors General.
Inspectors General have a strong historical precedent in our nation. IGs are
meant to be the watchdogs for Congress and the American taxpayer. The inde-
pendent oversight capability the IG wields to expose waste, fraud, abuse, and mis-
management is their core responsibility.
It is critical that the independence of Inspectors General is maintained. IGs are
meant to be IN their parent agencies, but not OF their parent agencies or any ad-
ministration. They are meant to be apolitical and set apart in order to do the hard
task of publicly highlighting the flaws of their parent agencies. Helping to advance
transparency and accountability within an administration is a difficult but nec-
essary role that the IG leads.
Each agency has a different mission and goal, making it challenging to have a
single, all-encompassing metric to evaluate the effectiveness of each IG. I hope this
hearing will be an opportunity to discuss the potential metrics by which each office
of the inspector general should be measured and where those offices currently stand.
This hearing is also a chance to highlight the important work done by each of the
offices before us today. I particularly want to highlight the oversight work sur-
rounding the growing threat to our cybersecurity and research integrity standards.
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed technologies forward and implemented remote ca-
pabilities far sooner than any anticipated. Hearing from each of you today on the
oversight efforts your agencies have taken to enhance cybersecurity standards and
promote research integrity is particularly important.
I hope this topic can be effectively discussed as it relates to the security of pass-
words and protective internal practices of each agency. This is likely to be a discus-
sion for future hearings, but I encourage conversations on this topic today as well.
Several of the agencies here today have received millions, if not billions, of federal
dollars to advance research and development initiatives. Massive spending bills
such as the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and
the Inflation Reduction Act have recently become law and provided agencies with
new statutory mandates as well as R&D funds to advance innovation. More spend-
ing means more opportunities for mismanagement of taxpayer funds, making the
IG’s role more important than ever. I would like to hear how each IG has already
begun to provide oversight of these taxpayer funds, as well as future oversight plans
in these areas. It is critical as new programs and funds are implemented that every
proper measure is taken to safeguard them from fraud and misuse.
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This hearing also serves as an opportunity for this committee to emphasize the
various findings the IGs have reported on in areas that have raised considerable
concern. Just a few issues we hope to address include the law enforcement presence
and mitigation efforts of sexual assault and harassment allegations in the Antarctic;
the extent of work from home policies in place; and various award and procurement
issues as we move closer to the Congressional appropriations season.
At this time, I would like to welcome to our esteemed witnesses and thank you
all for joining us. I am looking forward to a robust discussion with each of you. I
am hopeful our conversation today will highlight the good work being done in ac-
countability and transparency and help to strengthen your oversight and investiga-
tive efforts.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. And I’ll now recognize my Ranking Member, the
gentlewoman from North Carolina, for 5 minutes for her opening
statement.
Mrs. FOUSHEE. Thank you, Chairman Obernolte, and thank you
for leading today’s hearing. I’m very pleased to serve beside you
this Congress as the Ranking Member of Investigations and Over-
sight Subcommittee. Science Committee oversight of Federal sci-
entific enterprise is crucial. I look forward to working with you in
a bipartisan fashion to support the incredible work that scientists
inside and outside of government are doing every day to confront
the challenges of the 21 century and to maintain American leader-
ship in science and innovation.
I am a strong supporter of Federal scientific research, and I be-
lieve the Federal Government is irreplaceable in its ability to de-
ploy resources on a vast scale to fund breakthroughs in basic and
applied science. But with that singular role comes a responsibility
to use taxpayer dollars effectively. Through the work of their of-
fices, the Inspectors General testifying here today are helpful to up-
hold core principles of good government that we all share. That is
why I am proud to support their work and eager to hear their per-
spectives on strengthening the integrity of Federal scientific pro-
grams.
I am proud to represent North Carolina’s 4th Congressional Dis-
trict, which is one of the Nation’s leading hubs for scientific re-
search, led by research universities such as Duke University, the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina
Central University, as well as innovation centers like Research Tri-
angle Park. My district understands the power of science to gen-
erate innovation, transform industry, and create jobs.
Federal science agencies such as NSF (National Science Founda-
tion), DOE (Department of Energy), and EPA (Environmental Pro-
tection Agency) are important participants in this research eco-
system. North Carolina’s 4th is home to the world-class EPA lab,
where Federal researchers at EPA’s Office of Research and Devel-
opment provide the scientific underpinning for crucial health pro-
tective regulations. Agencies also fund programs and initiatives at
local institutions in support of a wide range of cutting-edge sci-
entific activities, such as DOE’s Triangle University’s Nuclear Lab-
oratory Center of Excellence and NSF’s Research Triangle Nano-
technology Network. So I have a keen interest in ensuring that
Federal research programs are managed well and adhere to best
practices in using the funds that are entrusted to them.
The researchers in my district are some of the most brilliant peo-
ple you will ever meet, and they deserve to know that the Federal
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agencies working to support them are upholding the same rigorous
standards that they apply to their own work.
I also want to emphasize that support for rigorous oversight does
not in any way signal a lack of support for investing in Federal re-
search at the levels we need to maintain American preeminence in
science and technology. Indeed, the two priorities go hand-in-hand.
The last Congress made critical investments in Federal science
through landmark legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act, the
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction
Act. These investments are a pillar of America’s future, and I am
committed to making sure that they endure. Careful oversight by
Congress, OIGs, and others will help maximize their impact be-
cause when it comes to Federal research funding, good government
is good policy.
I am grateful to the witnesses for testifying here today and for
the work that you do.
Once again, Chairman Obernolte, it is my great hope that
through our oversight efforts this Congress, we can find common
ground in support of American science. I believe we can. And I will
work with you to do so. I yield back.
[The prepared statement of Mrs. Foushee follows:]
Thank you, Chairman Obernolte, and thank you for leading today’s hearing. I’m
very pleased to serve beside you this Congress as the Ranking Member of the Inves-
tigations & Oversight Subcommittee.
Science Committee oversight of the federal scientific enterprise is crucial. I look
forward to working with you in a bipartisan fashion to support the incredible work
that scientists inside and outside of government are doing every day to confront the
challenges of the 21st Century and to maintain American leadership in science and
innovation.
I am a strong supporter of federal scientific research. And I believe the federal
government is irreplaceable in its ability to deploy resources on a vast scale to fund
breakthroughs in basic and applied science.
But with that singular role comes a responsibility to use taxpayer dollars effec-
tively. Through the work of their offices, the Inspectors General testifying here
today are helping to uphold core principles of good government that we all share.
That is why I am proud to support their work and eager to hear their perspectives
on strengthening the integrity of federal scientific programs.
I am proud to represent North Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District, which is
one of the nation’s leading hubs for scientific research. Led by research universities
such as Duke University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and North
Carolina Central University, as well as innovation centers like Research Triangle
Park, my district understands the power of science to generate innovation, trans-
form industry, and create jobs.
Federal science agencies such as NSF, DOE and EPA are important participants
in this research ecosystem. North Carolina’s Fourth is home to the world-class EPA
lab, where federal researchers at EPA’s Office of Research and Development provide
the scientific underpinning for crucial, health-protective regulations.
Agencies also fund programs and initiatives at local institutions in support of a
wide range of cutting-edge scientific activities, such as DOE’s Triangle Universities
Nuclear Laboratory Center of Excellence and NSF’s Research Triangle Nanotech-
nology Network.
So, I have a keen interest in ensuring that federal research programs are man-
aged well and adhere to best practices in using the funds that are entrusted to
them. The researchers in my district are some of the most brilliant people you will
ever meet, and they deserve to know that the federal agencies working to support
them are upholding the same rigorous standards that they apply to their own work.
I also want to emphasize that support for rigorous oversight does not, in any way,
signal a lack of support for investing in federal research at the levels we need to
maintain American preeminence in science and technology. Indeed, the two prior-
ities go hand in hand.
The last Congress made critical investments in federal science through landmark
legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs
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Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. These investments are a pillar of America’s
future, and I am committed to making sure they endure.
Careful oversight by Congress, OIGs, and others will help maximize their impact,
because when it comes to federal research funding, good government is good policy.
I am grateful to the witnesses for testifying here today and for the work that you
do.
Once again, Chairman Obernolte, it is my great hope that through our oversight
efforts this Congress, we can find common ground in support of American science.
I believe we can, and I will work with you to do so.
I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Ranking Member Foushee. I com-
pletely agree with you, and I think we will follow—find that com-
mon ground.
Chairman Lucas’ opening statement will be submitted for the
record.
At this time, I’d like to recognize the Ranking Member of the
Full Committee, Congresswoman Lofgren, for her opening state-
ment.
Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much. I want to thank Chairman
Lucas, Chairman Obernolte, for holding this hearing today. I’m a
big fan of the Inspector General concept. You do good work helping
us to find issues that need improvement. And given the large in-
vestments that we made in science in the last Congress, it’s impor-
tant that we take a look at how those programs are being adminis-
tered.
The investments in Federal science agencies are going to bring
about new discoveries on the shoulders of impressive accomplish-
ments in the past. I’ll just note that the Department of Energy will
continue leading us into a clean energy future, building upon the
incredible breakthroughs in fusion energy that we saw at the—in
the last year and, frankly, the last years.
The—as I said, the Inspectors General play an important role.
We’ve provided additional funding because with your additional re-
sponsibilities will come additional work. If—some challenges may
be difficult because some of these agencies may be standing up
completely new endeavors. It won’t be the same old, same old. And
I’m confident that the IGs will take that responsibility and that
new challenge seriously and be successful.
Now, the fact that I support rigorous oversight does not mean
that I am suspicious or unhappy about the investments that we
made in the last Congress. It’s important that we did that. And we
did it on a bipartisan basis. But investments made in the CHIPS
and Science program in particular, are—we need oversight. We
need oversight to make sure that those substantial investments are
making the best possible use of taxpayer dollars. I know that we
will do this on a bipartisan basis. And I want to thank the wit-
nesses for being here, as well as thanking our bipartisan science
group for once again working together for science advancement.
I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Lofgren follows:]
Good morning, and thank you to Chairman Lucas and Chairman Obernolte for
holding this hearing today.
Inspectors General are a crucial part of a healthy, functioning government eco-
system. Congress entrusts federal agencies with taxpayer money to steward our na-
tional priorities. The 117th Congress, especially, saw the passage of a number of
banner pieces of legislation. I’m proud that these bills—CHIPS and Science in par-
ticular—made heavy investments in our scientific enterprise. Congress charted a
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path for American scientific leadership, and now agencies are implementing those
ambitious plans.
The landmark investments will allow federal science agencies to bring about new
discoveries on the shoulders of their impressive accomplishments. The Department
of Energy will continue leading us into a clean energy future, building upon their
incredible breakthroughs in fusion energy. The National Science Foundation will
support a strong, diverse STEM workforce that will foster the talent we need to
maintain global leadership. NASA will bring humans back to the Moon while keep-
ing our eyes on Mars, advancing human exploration capabilities.
All the while, the Offices of Inspector General will play a critical role in ensuring
the billions of dollars authorized last Congress are properly spent. The funding in-
creases give our federal science agencies substantial resources to fulfill our national
goals. OIGs’ oversight of newly established programs will serve as necessary guide-
posts, offering decades of experience and lessons learned to initiatives still in their
infancy. Recommendations from our panel’s Officeswill ensure existing programs are
able to scale up their activities to best utilize increased funds.
The 117th Congress’s legislative efforts provided many IG offices with additional
funding to ensure they have the resources to oversee their home agencies. I hope
the Offices are carefully considering how to best use that money. Today, we’ll hear
from our witnesses about what challenges they face in ensuring their oversight ef-
forts are top-notch. Meeting the increased oversight needs in part will require a
larger workforce, which is easily addressed by additional funding. But some chal-
lenges may be more complicated. Perhaps a constituent agency is standing up a pro-
gram unlike any it’s had before, meaning there is minimal precedent for oversight
within the agency’s OIG. Maybe new initiatives involve inter-agency collaboration
that will require more cooperation among IG offices. And maybe the cutting-edge
priorities put forth by Congress will necessitate new metrics by which to judge fed-
eral science agencies.
As Ranking Member Foushee said in her opening statement, rigorous oversight
goes hand in hand with supporting strong investments in federal research. I want
to be clear that my emphasis on the need for robust and effective OIGs does not
indicate a skepticism of increased funding for science agencies. Federal programs
are strengthened by the recommendations of OIGs. In cases of waste, fraud, and
abuse by recipients of grant money, taxpayer funds are recovered by the work of
those appearing before our Committee today.
The investments made in CHIPS & Science enjoyed bipartisan support. Likewise,
I believe all of us here today—on both sides of the aisle—support strong oversight
that will facilitate the best use of taxpayer dollars. Thank you to the witnesses for
your important work, and for appearing before us today to educate us on your ef-
forts.
I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you very much, Ranking Member
Lofgren.
We will now move to our witness panel. All of our witnesses here
today are extremely accomplished and have participated in govern-
ment oversight for years, so welcome to all of you, and thank you
very much for being part of our panel today.
Our first witness today is Mr. Paul Martin, who is the current
Inspector General for the National Aeronautics and Space Adminis-
tration (NASA). Mr. Martin, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE PAUL K. MARTIN,
INSPECTOR GENERAL, NATIONAL AERONAUTICS
AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION (NASA)
Mr. MARTIN. Thank you, Chairman Obernolte and Ranking
Members Foushee and Lofgren and Committee Members.
While undoubtedly innovative and inspirational, NASA faces
longstanding challenges with its contracting and project manage-
ment that have led to substantial cost and schedule growth in
many of its programs. This morning, I plan to highlight three chal-
lenges that NASA must address to achieve its ambitious aero-
nautics, science, and space exploration goals. The first, developing
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comprehensive and accurate cost and schedule estimates. NASA
has struggled for years to develop reliable lifecycle estimates for
many of its multibillion dollar programs, including Artemis and the
James Webb Space Telescope. For Artemis, NASA lacks a com-
prehensive cost estimate that accounts for all program costs, an
omission that contributes to a lack of transparency into the funding
required to sustain the program. Through our audit work, the OIG
developed just such an estimate, and we project that NASA will
spend $93 billion on Artemis from 2012 through 2025. In addition,
we reported a cost of $4.1 billion per launch for at least the first
four Artemis missions, an expense we found unsustainable. NASA
must accelerate its efforts to make its Artemis-related programs
more affordable. Otherwise, relying on such an expensive single-
use rocket system will inhibit NASA’s ability to sustain its explo-
ration goals for the Moon and Mars.
The second challenge, project management. Our oversight work
over the years has identified multiple examples of project manage-
ment deficiencies. Specifically, our June 2022 report on develop-
ment of Mobile Launcher 2 (ML2), the ground structure required
to launch larger variants of the SLS (Space Launch System) Orion
system, found that NASA is likely to spend over $1 billion dollars
on ML2 or more than 2 1/2 times more than initially planned, with
final delivery at least 2 1/2 years late. We determined that the
project’s substantial cost increases and schedule delays are attrib-
utable primarily to the poor performance of Bechtel, the project’s
contractor. However, NASA’s management practices also contrib-
uted to cost increases and schedule delays.
And challenge three, choice of contracting vehicles and use of
award fees. NASA has struggled over the years to make the most
appropriate contracting decisions with its programs. Development
contracts such as those for the SLS core stages, boosters, and en-
gines, and the Orion capsule were sole-sourced, eliminating the po-
tential benefits of competition, and competitive follow-on awards
for the production contracts for these programs proved infeasible.
Moreover, NASA has a history of paying overly generous award
fees to contractors, fees that are often inconsistent with the quality
of their performance. For example, in October 2018, we reported
that issues driven mostly by Boeing’s poor performance resulted in
a 2 1/2 year schedule slip and $4 billion in cost increases for devel-
opment of two SLS core stages. However, between 2012 and 2017,
NASA paid Boeing $323 million in award, milestone, and incentive
fees, of which we questioned nearly $64 million.
We had similar concerns with Lockheed’s performance developing
Orion. In July 2020, we reported that Lockheed received nearly all
available award fees over a 9-year period, even though the program
was experienced $90 million—$900 million in cost increases and
schedule delays of more than 3 years. We calculated that NASA
paid Lockheed at least $27.8 million in excess award fees.
To its credit, NASA is taking steps to improve management of its
major programs. For example, the agency has decreased the use of
award fee contracts from 42 percent in 2020 to 28 percent just 2
years later. In addition, NASA is exploring ways to make its lunar
mission sustainable by transitioning several programs to fixed
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price contracts and increasingly utilizing public-private partner-
ships.
We look forward to sharing the results of our oversight work
with this Committee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Martin follows:]
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Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you very much, Mr. Martin.
Our second witness today is Ms. Allison Lerner, who is the cur-
rent Inspector General for the National Science Foundation. Ms.
Lerner, you are recognized for 5 minutes. The microphone, please.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE ALLISON C. LERNER,
INSPECTOR GENERAL,
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (NSF)
Ms. LERNER. There we go. Chairman Obernolte, Ranking Mem-
ber Foushee, and distinguished Members of the Committee, thank
you for having me here today. I appreciate this opportunity to dis-
cuss the National Science Foundation Office of Inspector General’s
efforts to combat fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
My testimony today will focus on three key areas: Our oversight,
addressing the strength and integrity of NSF programs and inter-
nal controls, our efforts to hold people accountable for wrongdoing
and to use insights from our investigations to strengthen internal
controls, and our collaborative approaches to ensure stewardship of
NSF funds and prevent wrongdoing.
On the first point, we use a robust risk assessment process to
focus our work on programs and institutions that appear to be at
highest risk. And we use flexible audit contracts and approaches to
ensure maximum impact of our limited audit resources. We also
seek ways to amplify the impact of our audits, including a recent
report on promising practices from our external audits, which
shares ways for all members of the NSF recipient community, not
just those we audit, to improve their stewardship of Federal funds.
Recent examples of our work include our report summarizing key
issues from our audits of recipients of the Established Program to
Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), which is helping NSF
build the award management capacity and capability of institutions
that have historically received limited Federal research funds, and
our recent summary of Federal OIG findings and recommendations
relating to Other Transaction Agreements (OTAs), which identified
risks inherent to OTAs for NSF to consider as it develops OTA poli-
cies and procedures for the new Technology, Innovation, and Part-
nership Directorate.
Moving to the second point, we use our in-depth experience fight-
ing grant fraud to protect NSF funds and to hold wrongdoers ac-
countable. We use multidisciplinary investigative teams to enhance
the thoroughness and success of our cases, and we pursue criminal,
civil, and administrative remedies, including governmentwide sus-
pensions and debarments to hold individuals who misuse NSF
funds to account. We also provide insights based on our cases to
NSF so it can tighten controls to prevent fraud in the future.
Because awardees who misuse NSF funds are often misusing re-
search funding from other Federal agencies, we lead two cross-gov-
ernment working groups focused on research security-related grant
fraud and fraud in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)
and Small Business Technology Transfer Programs to strengthen
the whole-of-government’s ability to hold individuals who misuse
research funds accountable.
Finally, we use collaborative approaches to ensure the effective
stewardship of NSF funds and prevent and address wrongdoing.
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Such actions include our robust outreach program, which helps
NSF recipients identify ways to prevent fraud and improve their
award management environments, and our deeply collaborative
working relationship with NSF’s Chief of Research Security, Strat-
egy, and Policy, with whom we work to confront research security-
related challenges.
As I close, I’d like to highlight two legislative initiatives that
could strengthen our ability to hold individuals who misuse NSF
funds accountable. The first reforms the Program Fraud Civil Rem-
edies Act to make it a stronger tool to recover fraudulent expendi-
tures and deter individuals from committing small-dollar fraud.
And the second would protect Federal funds by creating a manda-
tory statutory exclusion for those convicted of violating certain fel-
ony fraud statutes, ensuring that they don’t have access to govern-
ment funds for the period of that exclusion.
My office will continue to use all our audit and investigative re-
sources to protect taxpayer funds and safeguard the integrity of
NSF’s operations and its investments in science. We look forward
to working with NSF management, the National Science Board,
and Congress to achieve this goal.
This concludes my statement, and thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Lerner follows:]
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Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you very much, Ms. Lerner.
Our third witness will be Ms. Teri Donaldson, who is currently
the Inspector General for the Department of Energy. Ms. Donald-
son, you are recognized for 5 minutes. The microphone, please.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE TERI L. DONALDSON,
INSPECTOR GENERAL, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (DOE)
Ms. DONALDSON. Good morning, Chairman Obernolte, Ranking
Member Foushee. Thank you for having me here today.
I’d like to begin my comments by talking about some of the huge
risk factors associated with the newer funds moving to the Depart-
ment of Energy, which the Ranking Member alluded to earlier. So
just by way of context, in Fiscal Year 2022, the Department of En-
ergy’s annual budget was $44.3 billion. When you combine the
funds authorized or appropriated under IIJA, IRA, the CHIPS Act,
and $1 billion dollars to support solar projects in Puerto Rico, that
number goes from $44.3 to $478 billion now within the portfolio of
the Department of Energy. These are historic and unprecedented
numbers.
I’d also point out to the Committee that the money is moving
quickly. So we already have $62 billion that is on the move. It is
either out the door or the subject of funding opportunities and mov-
ing out the door. So where you have a huge amount of money that
is moving quickly, there are immediately new risks. Associated
with these statutes, we have 71 brand new programs. By definition,
brand new programs are utilizing untested internal controls, cre-
ates enormous risk. Over 1/2 of these funds will move to State,
local governments, and tribes. It is not yet clear whether those en-
tities are ready to receive funds in these unprecedented volumes.
So a couple of other things to point out about the Department of
Energy. Even prior to these three bills, the Department of Energy
was the leanest Federal agency on the block with over 90 percent
of its dollars moving through to its contractors, so something of a
passthrough agency. So I noted when I took over this job a little
over 4 years ago, the volume of reports all concluding that the De-
partment of Energy lacked appropriate resources for oversight. And
essentially, all of those included the Department acknowledging
that it lacked appropriate resources for oversight. So it is against
that landscape that all of this new money is now going to be dis-
tributed. The Department of Energy received in the IIJA a cap for
most of the IIJA programs of only 3 percent for oversight, a little
more flexibility in IRA, which is positive. But I would point out
that those oversight numbers are largely utilized to move the
money out the door because they’re classified as administrative ex-
penses, most of which are to help the programs get money out the
door. Only a small percentage will actually be for oversight, which
is making sure that the funds landed where Congress intended
them to land. So the Department is arguably under-resourced for
oversight even in connection with the new funds.
My shop is dramatically under-resourced to conduct oversight.
So—and there’s details in my written testimony, but when I came
on board, my shop was already trailing the other CFO Act (Chief
Financial Officers Act) agencies under-resourced historically. All
these new funds came along, and now my shop is so dramatically
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under-resourced that I feel compelled to mention this anytime that
I’m on the Hill. So my shop received zero additional funding in con-
nection with the CHIPS Act, zero additional funding in connection
with the $1 billion for Puerto Rico, and we received only small
numbers in connection with IIJA and IRA. So it’s all detailed in my
testimony, but it’s something that will make it very difficult for us
to conduct the audits, inspections, and investigations that are going
to be so needed as we turn the corner into spending these massive
amounts of money.
I always say that all of the coordination and planning in the
world—and we are doing a lot of that right now. We’ve had over
27 meetings with the Department since IIJA passed. But all of the
coordinating and the planning in the world is not a substitute for
people. You have to have the money to conduct oversight, so that’s
probably my most important theme of the day.
The Department of Energy is also behind in the world of data
analytics. Congress has been expressing its interest in that area
since 2017. The General Accounting Office has made specific rec-
ommendations to the Department of Energy, that it be imple-
menting data analytics, acquiring transaction-level detail. It has
not yet done that. And that’s unfortunate because now we have
these big amounts of money that will be moving through, and data
analytics is still only in its earliest stages at the Department of En-
ergy.
And that concludes my comments. I look forward to your ques-
tions. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Donaldson follows:]
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Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you very much, Ms. Donaldson.
Our fourth witness this morning will be Eric Soskin, who is the
current Inspector General for the Department of Transportation
(DOT). Mr. Soskin, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE ERIC J. SOSKIN,
INSPECTOR GENERAL,
DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION (DOT)
Mr. SOSKIN. Chairman Obernolte, Ranking Member Foushee,
and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to tes-
tify on preventing waste, fraud, and mismanagement at the De-
partment of Transportation. I’m pleased to be joining IGs Martin,
Lerner, Donaldson, and O’Donnell today to discuss how our work
helps safeguard taxpayer dollars while improving the efficiency and
effectiveness of government programs. In our oversight activities,
we routinely collaborate with partners across the Federal Govern-
ment, including with the other OIGs represented here today, as
well as with the Department of Justice (DOJ).
For Fiscal Year 2022, DOT’s budget authority included approxi-
mately $355 billion to fund programs and operations through
grants, contracts, and other means, including just a small portion,
about $1.5 billion dollars, dedicated to research and development.
Congress has also authorized $660 billion for DOT through the In-
frastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA, along with $106 bil-
lion in COVID–19 relief funding. As such, as IG Donaldson was ref-
erencing, the Department now manages and must oversee much
higher fund totals than ever before. This in turn increases the risk
of fraud and mismanagement.
To help prevent the loss of Federal dollars, our office investigates
allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse affecting DOT programs,
contractors, grantees, and regulated entities. In Fiscal Year 2022,
procurement and grant fraud investigations represented about 36
percent of our caseload. High-risk categories of fraud included brib-
ery and corruption, overcharges for labor and materials, fraud re-
lated to Disadvantaged Business Enterprises, or DBEs, and bid-rig-
ging. For example, as an outcome of a recent investigation by our
office, a North Carolina engineering firm was sentenced to $8.5
million dollars in fines and restitution. The firm was convicted of
rigging bids related to DOT-funded projects that facilitate drainage
around highways, roads, bridges, and overpasses.
Strong internal controls and oversight are what’s required to pre-
vent such fraud, including effective procedures to identify and as-
sess risks. In response to the Fraud Reduction and Data Analytics
Act of 2015, DOT developed a fraud risk management implementa-
tion plan. This plan formalized the structure of DOT’s fraud risk
management processes and included fraud in the Department’s as-
sessments of improper payment risks.
However, DOT must also consider risks beyond improper pay-
ments, both financial and nonfinancial. For example, some fraud
can have safety consequences and other consequences such as lim-
ited competition. We are currently evaluating DOT’s fraud risk as-
sessments for its surface transportation programs, including those
funded by IIJA in an audit we announced last year.
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A number of strategies can help mitigate the risks posed by
fraud to DOT programs. It is critical to educate staff, grantees, and
contractors on how to recognize, prevent, and report potential pro-
curement and grant fraud. This is particularly important because
of the extent to which DOT, like the Department of Energy, has its
grant funding flow from States to subrecipients and contractors
who have less direct contact with the agency, as well as to new re-
cipients and subrecipients who may have less experience managing
Federal funds.
Our Office of Investigations conducts outreach to increase such
awareness, but this outreach does not reach all stakeholders who
may be knowledgeable about fraud-related activities. For example,
prime contractors play essential roles in obtaining DBE participa-
tion and overseeing it. DOT and its grantees must do their parts
to ensure contractors know their responsibilities to recognize and
report suspected fraud. And such outreach is just one step in en-
suring that each recipient of Federal funds commits in its culture
and structure to preventing fraud.
Strengthening oversight is also vital to detecting and preventing
fraud, waste, and mismanagement. Oversight at the DOT operating
administration level and program level is the focus of much of our
audit work, and we have found that DOT faces challenges in moni-
toring grantees’ documentation to ensure they use funds as in-
tended. An example of that was in our recent oversight and audit
report of FAA’s (Federal Aviation Administration’s) Cares Act
grants. And to its credit, DOT has already taken steps to address
the recommendations we made in that report.
Nevertheless, opportunities remain to enhance DOT’s oversight
and safeguard Federal funds. Our office is committed to supporting
DOT and meeting its mission while strengthening its processes to
prevent fraud, waste, and mismanagement on behalf of the Amer-
ican taxpayer.
This concludes my prepared statement, and I’m happy to answer
any questions you may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Soskin follows:]
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Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Mr. Soskin.
Our final witness today will be Mr. Sean O’Donnell, who is the
Inspector General at the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr.
O’Donnell, you’re recognized for 5 minutes.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE SEAN W. O’DONNELL,
INSPECTOR GENERAL,
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY (EPA)
Mr. O’DONNELL. Thank you. Good morning, Chairman Obernolte,
Ranking Member Foushee, and Members of the Committee. I’m
Sean O’Donnell. I am the Inspector General for the United States
Environmental Protection Agency. I would like to thank the Com-
mittee for inviting me to testify about the EPA Office of Inspector
General’s efforts to protect American taxpayers from fraud, waste,
and mismanagement.
Although relatively small, our office has averaged nearly 60 re-
ports a year for the last 10 years, yielding a return on investment
(ROI) of over 300 percent. And we are on pace to do even better
this year. Indeed, during the last year, my office has risen to the
challenge of overseeing critical EPA programs from identifying
cyber vulnerabilities in America’s water sector to reporting poten-
tial waste in the EPA’s wood heater changeout programs, and
there’s more to come. For example, we are auditing the nearly $50
million that the city of Jackson received for Mississippi’s Drinking
Water State Revolving Fund (SRF). And we’ve already uncovered
evidence that the EPA may have instructed States to ignore single
audit findings such as those for the city of Jackson when making
award decisions.
Following enactment of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs
Act, we immediately began conducting oversight, starting with our
inaugural IIJA oversight plan released in April 2022. Since then,
we have published nearly a dozen oversight products, as well as
created an interactive webpage. And we have seven projects in
progress and six more planned, covering such things as supply
chain concerns and SRF capacity issues. Finally, our investigators
are employing every tool available to us to fight fraud, from task
forces to data analytics.
But we have our work cut out for us. For context, in any given
year, the EPA manages around 6,000 grants, totaling approxi-
mately $21 billion. Furthermore, through various infrastructure
programs, the EPA has funded over $230 billion in water projects,
and now the EPA faces the task of managing $100 billion from the
IIJA and the Inflation Reduction Act.
There are four areas where we can help the EPA meet these
challenges. The first and arguably most important relates to whis-
tleblowers. From my very first day as Inspector General, I have en-
couraged whistleblowers and worked to vindicate their rights. This
includes holding annual National Whistleblower Appreciation Day
panels that draw more than 1,000 attendees. But encouraging and
protecting whistleblowers is a responsibility we share with the
EPA. Last month, we identified the need for the EPA’s terms and
conditions to specifically address whistleblower responsibilities.
And we are working to partner these new provisions with an offi-
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cial policy implementing statutory protections for recipient whistle-
blowers.
Encouraging and protecting whistleblowers at the EPA starts
with the EPA. We have recently reported on the EPA’s failure to
share whistleblower allegations of misconduct with us, particularly
when related to science. We are working with the agency to ensure
that we are promptly notified of these allegations, and we will con-
tinue to work with it to ensure that it has policies protecting its
whistleblowers.
The second area we are focused on is raising fraud awareness
among EPA staff and stakeholders. Since the enactment of the
IIJA, our investigators and auditors have conducted around 170
fraud or cybersecurity briefings, reaching nearly 4,000 attendees.
And we recently identified the need for the EPA to implement best
practices in alerting grantees to the consequences of fraudulent
conduct and in reporting such conduct to the OIG.
A third area of focus is ensuring the OIG access to agency and
grantee information. To facilitate audits and investigations regu-
latory provisions augment our subpoena authority by allowing us
access to recipients and their records. A best practice we have iden-
tified is adding OIG access provisions to the EPA’s terms and con-
ditions.
Finally, we are concerned about systemic issues related to the
EPA’s grant management. We found that the EPA’s various offices
stored grant files in disparate ways from electronic media to paper
files, and an EPA working group found that the agency uses 55
data bases to store data from around 100 grant programs. From an
oversight perspective, it hinders our ability to conduct effective
oversight, limiting our ability to, for example, analyze historical
data and suspicious trends. It also, from an administrative stand-
point, hampers the EPA’s ability to comprehensively and consist-
ently manage grants.
The EPA OIG is leading the fight against fraud, waste, and
abuse. Moreover, we are doing so despite a decade of flat and de-
clining budgets. Recognizing the need for IIJA-focused oversight,
Congress provided us with dedicated funding. We are grateful for
this support, and we’re putting it to good use. However, we did not
receive IRA funding to carry out IRA-focused oversight. On a posi-
tive note, the agency supports a reprogramming of funds for the
OIG, converting some existing IRA dollars to dedicated oversight
funding. I’m hopeful that Congress will recognize the value in
doing so and take timely action.
I thank you for your support and look forward to answering your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. O’Donnell follows:]
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Mr. OBERNOLTE. Well, thank you very much, Mr. O’Donnell, and
thank you to all of you for your testimony.
We’ll now move to the Member question-and-answers portion of
our hearing. And I will go first by recognizing myself for 5 minutes.
I’m sure that everyone followed with increasingly distress and
horror the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline recently, where a loss
and compromise of a single password resulted in a vital part of
American infrastructure being shut down for several days, which
disrupted oil supplies to the entire Eastern United States. It was
interesting to see that that was caused by the compromise of a sin-
gle password. So I was very alarmed when recently I read a report
from the Department of the Interior (DOI) who conducted an inves-
tigation into their password security. And what they found was
that over 20 percent of the passwords used in the DOI system were
able to be easily hacked. They found that the most commonly used
password was the word ‘‘password’’ followed by the numbers
123456. And in fact, almost 5 percent of the passwords in use by
users on the DOI system were some variation of the word pass-
word. So, unfortunately, looking at our experience with consumers
across the country, that behavior is not surprising. But in light of
what happened at Colonial, I think it is very disturbing. I’m won-
dering if any of you have conducted similar investigations into
password security at your agencies? I don’t see any volunteers, so
I’d like to ask you briefly if you’d be willing to undertake that task
because I think it’s one that, you know, would not be difficult to
accomplish but could potentially be very important. And, Mr. Mar-
tin?
Mr. MARTIN. Be happy to take that——
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you.
Mr. MARTIN [continuing]. Under consideration.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Ms. Lerner?
Ms. LERNER. As would I.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. I appreciate that. And, Ms. Donaldson?
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, in fact we already do——
Mr. OBERNOLTE. The microphone, please. Thank you.
Ms. DONALDSON. We actually do a lot of work in the area of
cybersecurity. So in Fiscal Year 2021, we identified over 42,000
vulnerabilities across 12 sites at the Department of Energy. We
still have 23 open—or 38 recommendations open from that work,
and we will be issuing 35 new recommendations shortly, so we do
a lot of work in that space. And some of that does cover the pass-
word-related issues. So there’s a lot more work to go with the De-
partment of Energy.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Well, I’m glad you’re focused on it. I know it’s
frustrating to have open recommendations but keep pushing be-
cause that’s how we get them closed.
Mr. Soskin?
Mr. SOSKIN. Chairman Obernolte, our information technology
and cybersecurity audits group, on a rotating basis, looks at, among
other things, the cybersecurity of the Department’s operating ad-
ministrations. Our recent reports on the Federal Motor Carrier
Safety Administration found similar security vulnerabilities to
what you’re describing with passwords. And our audit of the Fed-
eral Transit Administration’s cybersecurity found shortcomings in
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its use of multifactor authentication, which as you all probably
know from your use of bank accounts and other things that you
personally secure, is better than relying solely on a password. We
continue to do that work, and we are heartened by the Depart-
ment’s efforts to address our open recommendations. And we look
forward to continuing to work with the Department’s new Chief In-
formation Officer and relatively new Chief Information Security Of-
ficer as well.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Well, thank you, Mr. Soskin. Thank you for the
good work.
Mr. O’Donnell?
Mr. O’DONNELL. Thank you. For the last 2 years, we’ve identified
cybersecurity and in particular cybersecurity of the critical water
infrastructure as a top management challenge. We will continue to
do so. And I’d be happy to have my staff come and meet with your
staff to discuss the work we’ve done, including on passwords.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. OK. Well, that’s good. I’m in particular inter-
ested in the issue of passwords for two reasons: One, because it is
such an easily solved problem if we elevate awareness of the issue;
and second, because the consequences of failure to solve it can be
so severe.
The second thing I’d like to ask about is something I mentioned
in my opening statement regarding the metrics for evaluating the
success of the Office of the Inspector General. Your agencies rep-
resent such a wide variety of roles and responsibilities. I think it
is very hard to come up with one universal metric for each of you
to use to evaluate the performances of your office. So I’m won-
dering what metrics you either use or would suggest that we use
to evaluate whether or not an IG is doing a good job in overseeing
their agency. Anyone ever thought about that?
Mr. O’DONNELL. Yes, sir. So—and I’m sure my colleagues would
tell you every type of oversight is different. For us, I have built into
the performance metrics of my entire staff, timely and relevant
work, high quality, timely work. But as an office, of course, we look
at ROI. And as I said, for us, it’s been, you know, around 300 per-
cent for the last 10 years. We also look at the number of reports
that we issue, but then there are those nonquantifiable ones. And
as a former IG once shared as I was commiserating about some
tough responses from the agency on some of our reports, he said,
you know, when you’re catching flak, you know you’re over the tar-
get. And I kind of take that as a measure, too. When we’re catching
flak from the agency, we know we’re doing good work.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. So you mentioned return on investment. How do
you calculate that?
Mr. O’DONNELL. We do it through the various forms potential
monetary benefit, questioned costs, identified waste, and then of
course returns to the government through fines, restitution, and
the like.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. And investment? Do you actually track the
manpower on each one of those investigations and assign a mone-
tary value to it?
Mr. O’DONNELL. We do. We do track the cost. In fact, I person-
ally have a dashboard in my office where I get to see how many
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hours are billed to every project so that I can make sure that
they’re done efficiently.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Interesting. And you mentioned timeliness and
relevance. How do you track those?
Mr. O’DONNELL. We do it—first of all, I think time and relevancy
are hand-in-glove, also quality. For me it’s quality and it’s getting
measured, and, again, how quickly we respond to emergencies.
How quickly are we responding to environmental emergencies for
which we need to do oversight. For example, we just noticed an in-
quiry into the fuel spill at East Palestine. That’s an example of me
seeing my staff being timely and relevant to the issues that are af-
fecting the EPA.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Sure. Well, I see I’m out of time. But I’d like
to do some more thinking about this issue because it’s difficult for
us to do our oversight unless we have a metric by which we’re eval-
uating you. And your roles are so diverse. I think that this is an
important topic. So I thank you for your answers.
At this point, I will yield 5 minutes to my distinguished colleague
from North Carolina, Mrs. Foushee, for her questions.
Mrs. FOUSHEE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Inspector General Lerner, I’ll direct these first questions to you.
The National Science Foundation has a significant presence in my
district. In the latest fiscal year, NSF awarded nearly $85 million
to Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill alone. NSF also supports cutting-edge research initiatives in
the district such as the Research Triangle, Nanotechnology Net-
work, and the Athena Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Re-
search. I would like to learn more about how oversight from NSF
OIG helps to strengthen the kind of research investments that are
so important to districts like mine. So my first question is how does
oversight by the OIG benefit major research institutions that re-
ceive awards from NSF on a regular basis for scientific research?
Ms. LERNER. Happy to answer that. One of the great things that
our audit work does is dig into how people who receive NSF funds
are using that money. And we take the results of what we find in
our audits and we deal with not just with the issues and problems
that we found at the institutions that we’ve audited, but we use
our outreach program to share what we found with the research
administration community and the research community so they can
see what problems they might have and try to solve them in their
agencies, even though we aren’t there to audit them. So we try to
get—to amplify the impact of our work by pushing it out and get-
ting it to not just the people that we audit, but to the people that
are in other agencies that can improve their programs based on
what we found.
Mrs. FOUSHEE. Thank you. And how does the OIG approach its
oversight of research initiatives that span multiple research insti-
tutions and public, private, and academic stakeholders? Are the im-
portant distinctions in how the OIG evaluates these kinds of in-
vestments?
Ms. LERNER. You know, I think we follow risk. And so when
we—if we see a collaborative effort that has greater risk because
of the nature of it, that will receive more attention from us. If it’s
an established program, it’s less likely to. One of the areas that
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we’re focusing on, you know, right now is the development of new
programs in the Technology, Innovation, and Partnership Direc-
torate that are new to the agency, new to the academic community,
and bring greater risks with them. So we are we are constantly try-
ing to keep a finger on the risk environment and target our re-
sources where appropriate.
Mrs. FOUSHEE. And finally, how do the relationships that you
build with stakeholders in the research community improve your
ability to conduct oversight of NSF? And what can you do to de-
velop those relationships even further?
Ms. LERNER. One of the things that I’ve learned in 13 years in
sitting in this role is that, you know, IGs can’t make anyone do
anything. We want to try to convince people through the strength
of our work, but the strength of our relationships matter. And
the—you know, the benefit of having strong relationships with our
agency and with the community that we audit is we can learn from
them, too. And they can come to us—especially when the pandemic
hit and academic community—the academic community, like the
Federal Government had to switch to a virtual environment, we
were able to reach out to our network of people that we knew and
get a sense of how they were responding to that change and how
that might affect the risk environment. So we can learn from them,
they can learn from us, and everyone has benefited.
Mrs. FOUSHEE. And thank you. With the rest of my time, would
anybody else on the panel like to add your observations to these
previous questions?
Well, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. The gentlewoman yields back.
Congressman Posey, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. POSEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Donaldson, has Department of Energy research grant fund-
ing and loans been used to generate actual commercial production
by American companies?
Ms. DONALDSON. You know, I would point to the work being done
at the national labs to say that much of their spectacular work has
a commercial application, as well as the work that the NNSA (Na-
tional Nuclear Security Administration) labs do. So I would say,
yes. That’s not the type of thing that is tracked by my office so I
couldn’t quantify that for you.
Mr. POSEY. OK. So do you think their office has a measure to—
a system to measure research to commercial production?
Ms. DONALDSON. They probably have multiple systems because
there’s so many different programs, but I would imagine they’re
doing some tracking, at least in some of those programs.
Mr. POSEY. Yes, can you get back to me on what they’re doing
and kind of——
Ms. DONALDSON. I certainly can.
Mr. POSEY. Thank you. Mr. Martin, when the space shuttle was
winding down, NASA ramped up the number of firefighters that
they had at Kennedy Space Center. Now with a launch cadence in-
creasing from 57 last year to 97 this year, NASA is decreasing fire-
fighters at the Kennedy Space Center. Can you tell me why? I
mean, I was told there was a study on it. Then I was told there
was no study.
105
Mr. MARTIN. Yes, Congressman, I was unaware of that situation
until staff brought it to my attention yesterday. I’d be happy to
look into it.
Mr. POSEY. OK. I have that commitment?
Mr. MARTIN. Yes, sir.
Mr. POSEY. You’ll get back to me. Thank you.
Mr. MARTIN. I will.
Mr. POSEY. Now this question is for each of you from left to right.
I will start with Mr. Martin. How many investigations and audits
has your office conducted within the last year, No. 1? How many
of those by percentage involve China? Just roughly swag it. And
did any of the China-related investigations require coordination of
activities across other agencies or other inspectors general? And
were any of these cases referred to the DOJ?
Mr. MARTIN. Sir, I will start. Investigations ongoing during the
past year, 482 for the Office of Inspector General at NASA. How
many of those by percentage involve China? Approximately 10 per-
cent. And does any of the China investigations require coordina-
tion? I coordinated with several my colleagues here at the table, in-
cluding NSF and DOE. And a goodly number of our cases were re-
ferred to the Department of Justice and are under prosecutorial
consideration right now.
Mr. POSEY. Thank you.
Mr. MARTIN. Yes, sir.
Ms. LERNER. The statistics that I have are for 5 years, so I can
get back to you on the 1 year other than I can say we worked 175
investigations in the past year, many of those related to China. I
can—about 45 percent of our investigative portfolio right now, our
research security-related matters, many of which relate to China.
And we, as I noted in my opening remarks, lead a cross-govern-
ment working group that’s focused on these sorts of research secu-
rity investigations with the goal of improving the government’s ef-
forts, especially in situations where there are multiple agencies af-
fected by a particular researcher’s failure to disclose their relation-
ships. So we are deeply involved in that and will provide further
information for you for the record.
Mr. POSEY. Thank you.
Ms. DONALDSON. Mic is on so there’s that. In Fiscal Year 2022,
the Office of Investigations worked on 320 ongoing matters. Thirty-
four were grant fraud cases, over one-third of those were research
security matters related to countries of concern. And all of those
pertain to China.
Mr. POSEY. How many were referred to DOJ?
Ms. DONALDSON. The bulk of our cases do eventually get referred
to DOJ. We made a total of 61 referrals in this timeframe, not all
research security-related.
Mr. POSEY. OK.
Ms. DONALDSON. But over half of what we work on goes to the
Department of Justice.
Mr. POSEY. Thank you.
Mr. SOSKIN. In this fiscal year, we have 447 complaints plus in-
vestigations in our inventory. As I mentioned, only a small fraction
of the Department of Transportation’s funding pertains to research
and development, and consequently, a smaller share of our inves-
106
tigations relate to China. I do not have numbers on that for you,
but we could get back to you with that.
As with the Energy OIG, most of our investigations ultimately
end up in consultation and referral to the Department of Justice.
And I don’t have a specific number on referrals either.
Mr. POSEY. Thank you. Mr. O’Donnell?
Mr. O’DONNELL. Yes, thank you. And I’ll give you as good of
numbers as I can but of course offer to come back and give clarity.
We had in the last Fiscal Year 176 cases opened. The majority of
those I would say, the bread and butter, were either lab fraud or
grant fraud. Some small number involves China. And I must say
that for IG Lerner, her office is really the leader for us in helping
us identify China-related cases. But our work has recently resulted
in a report we just issued encouraging the EPA to include grant
terms and conditions provisions that require grantees to disclose
any foreign sources that they get after they’ve received a grant.
And of course, like my colleagues, most of our cases get referred to
the Department of Justice.
Mr. POSEY. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My time has
expired.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Mr. Posey.
I now recognize the Ranking Member of the Full Committee, Ms.
Lofgren, for 5 minutes. Oh, then we’ll go to Ms. Bonamici.
Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you so much, Chair Obernolte and also
Ranking Member Foushee. Thank you to the witnesses as well.
I appreciate the Office of Inspectors General and the goal of pro-
moting transparency and accountability and protecting public trust.
Ambitious funding for science policy, including research and devel-
opment, is intended to lead to evidence-based decisionmaking and
informed agency practices and with strong oversight by your of-
fices. We know when taxpayer dollars are used efficiently and effec-
tively, and, importantly, when policies are implemented as in-
tended.
I have a two-part question for you, Ms. Lerner. Your office pub-
lished a white paper last month about the complexities of inves-
tigating and adjudicating sexual assault and stalking in the United
States Antarctic Program. And I have worked a lot with NOAA
(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) on this issue,
so I appreciate the careful consideration of both a complicated legal
environment and also the imperative that responders and inves-
tigators be properly trained in a trauma-informed approach. And I
hope that NSF, the prime contractor, and other stakeholders use
this document as they work to address sexual assault, which is a
criminal matter. But some of the issues raised in your white paper
should also be considered in noncriminal matters such as sexual
harassment, which is treated as a violation of the code of conduct.
So what are the takeaways from the white paper that are also ap-
plicable in noncriminal contexts?
Ms. LERNER. I think that ensuring that there is trust in the envi-
ronment and there is not a fear of retaliation so that people can
come forward with concerns is essential, whether you’re dealing
with a criminal violation or sexual harassment. And it’s imperative
that NSF and—take action and ensure that the contractors and
subcontractors down there are creating an environment where peo-
107
ple feel that they can bring these matters forward. So that’s first
and foremost, one, what has to happen there.
There also needs to be clarity about what rights people have. We
are in the process of conducting an inspection of what’s happening
in McMurdo and Antarctica. And what we’re seeing is there—that
there—you know, people don’t understand where they can go when
they’ve been assaulted or harassed, and we are going to produce
products to help improve that because it’s essential to create a
workplace that the people deserve.
Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you. And the second part of the question
is that it’s likely that in many cases of sexual assault in Antarctica
and other remote places, there may be sexual harassment, as well
as sexual assault. So one of those is a crime and another is a viola-
tion of the code of conduct. Some of the survivors of assault may
choose not to file a criminal charge, but they still deserve a remedy
and a safe environment. So when instituting better systems for
intaking and adjudicating sexual assault, how can the institutions
such as NSF guarantee that allegations of sexual harassment are
treated with the same support and investigation that someone—
and resources that someone who alleges a crime may have?
Ms. LERNER. One of the things that we think is critical right now
is that complaints go to an independent, trusted third party for as-
sessment, and then that victims, if they choose to pursue criminal
redress are able to pursue that. If not, that there are strong and
trusted mechanisms for handling matters administratively, and we
are going to be providing input——
Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you. We have a lot of conversations on this
Committee about diversifying——
Ms. LERNER. Yes.
Ms. BONAMICI [continuing]. The workforce, so we need to make
sure that employees are safe.
Ms. LERNER. Yes.
Ms. BONAMICI. Mr. O’Donnell, I have a question for you as well.
The EPA website states, quote, ‘‘The Portland Harbor Superfund
site was added to EPA’s national priorities list in December 2000.’’
Well, that was 23 years ago. So there has been some progress
made, but sections of the Willamette River remain contaminated by
heavy metals and industrial chemicals, posing risks to human
health and the environment and affecting economic growth in the
area. So what role does the EPA Office of Inspector General play
in ensuring the successful execution of superfund site cleanups?
And how does maintaining rigorous oversight contribute to the ef-
fectiveness and accountability of this important environmental res-
toration project, which has been going on for decades?
Mr. O’DONNELL. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I don’t have
my eye specifically on the Portland superfund site, but it’s one that
I will definitely look at and get back to you on.
Ms. BONAMICI. I appreciate that.
Mr. O’DONNELL. Since I have been at the OIG, I have begun the
process of instituting inspections of superfund sites and brownfield
sites because, for me, it is very important that we have boots on
the ground looking at what’s going on. So it’s one thing to do ac-
countability from afar. It’s another thing to be right there, see
what’s happening, talk to the people who are there. We are doing
108
that now down in Alabama. We are doing it in Missouri as well.
And this is a portfolio we intend to expand.
Ms. BONAMICI. Thank you. I know your Region 10 folks have
been involved, but 23 years, that’s from the time that it was actu-
ally listed and added to the priorities list, 23 years ago. And need-
less to say, the costs of cleanup are not getting any lower. I’m sure
they’re significantly more as time goes on. So I appreciate your
willingness to follow up on that.
And I yield back. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Ms. Bonamici.
Congressman Babin, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. BABIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, all of you
IGs, for your expert testimony. It’s very, very helpful.
Many of the more controversial problems facing research agen-
cies can be mitigated by ensuring agencies conduct their own due
diligence and compliance audits. And two that come to mind are
the duplicative Small Business Innovation Research grants, SBIR;
and two, grantee connections to entities with known foreign eco-
nomic espionage interests.
Ms. Lerner, when you testified before this Committee in 2009,
you indicated that duplicative funding in which companies obtained
payments from multiple SBIR agencies for the same work is the
most frequent violation that we have found in SS-in NSF’s SBIR
program.
Mr. Martin, a NASA IG report from 2009 also found that, in ana-
lyzing investigations conducted by NASA OIG and others, we found
that SBIR award recipients received multiple SBIR contracts for
essentially the same research and provided duplicate deliverables
or questionable research products.
I understand a task force was established at the Council of In-
spectors General on Integrity and Efficiency to address this issue
over 10 years ago. However, under the Federal Managers Financial
Integrity Act and Office of Management and Budget requirements,
agency managers are required to establish effective internal con-
trols themselves.
So to the panel as a whole, what is the status of interagency
SBIR duplication oversight? Is this taskforce still active? If not,
why is it not? Has the problem gone away or are the agencies doing
a better job of conducting these compliance audits themselves? Do
you have data to support either of these conclusions? And can you
provide historical trend data related to SBIR grant duplication, au-
dits, and findings for the record?
So, Mr. Martin, if you would respond first, I would appreciate it.
Mr. MARTIN. Sure. Actually, if I could kick it to Allison first.
Mr. BABIN. OK.
Mr. MARTIN. She’s the chair of the group, and then I’ll supple-
ment her.
Mr. BABIN. OK. Thank you.
Ms. LERNER. Thank you. And what I can say is that the group
that we started after the hearing in 2009 is alive and well and had
its most recent meeting just last month. It brings together agents
from across government to—who are working these sorts of cases
to highlight opportunities to work together, but also to figure out
how to work better. And, you know—and to pursue—when we pur-
109
sue cases, use the best set of facts and have the strongest possible
outcome as a result of that. I’m happy to provide you with more
detail about the specifics of what that group has accomplished. I’m
really, really proud of it.
Mr. BABIN. Thank you very much. And if y’all could keep it just
as brief as you can, I may not have time to do my other questions.
Mr. MARTIN. Sure. I would just say there’s tremendous coordina-
tion and cooperation within the IG community to address these
cases, but I still don’t think there’s a singular source that would
indicate duplication of effort by a grantee that they’re going to
DOE for funding to NASA. We don’t have that solution yet.
Mr. BABIN. Yes. OK. Thank you.
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, sir. It is definitely——
Mr. BABIN. Ms. Donaldson.
Ms. DONALDSON [continuing]. Still a problem for the Department
of Energy. We still see those cases coming through. I think the an-
swer lies in acquiring that transactional-level, recipient-level data
and having a robust data analytics approach to the problem, much
like what track has done on the pandemic spending. And I think
a lot of the agencies are excited about that prospect but not yet far
enough along to be able to do it and share that information, have
a data-driven approach.
Mr. BABIN. Thank you. Mr. Soskin?
Mr. SOSKIN. In our handful of research and development-related
cases, we too have seen the need to coordinate with our OIG part-
ners because they frequently involve cases where a grantee is seek-
ing funds from multiple sources for the same work.
Mr. BABIN. Mr. O’Donnell?
Mr. O’DONNELL. Thank you. Our SBIR cases are worked here,
many of them with my colleagues here in their offices. With respect
to the EPA, I’ve already spoken to our concerns with respect to its
grant management practices generally. I think those concerns ex-
tend to their ability to conduct audits inside of their programs.
Mr. BABIN. I knew—I know that you’re all familiar with the Wolf
amendment named after Frank Wolf. Mr. Martin, does the Wolf
amendment prohibit NASA from issuing research grants to individ-
uals with connections to Chinese universities, especially institu-
tions with known connections to the PLA (People’s Liberation
Army) or malign foreign talent recruitment programs?
Mr. MARTIN. Yes, sir. That is my understanding.
Mr. BABIN. OK. Several high profile cases involving NASA re-
searchers with connections to China were unsuccessfully pros-
ecuted in recent years, and some of them because of the confusion
over the existing law. And I was just wondering if a separate provi-
sion in the CHIPS and Science Act passed last summer requires all
grant applicants to certify that they are not a party to malign for-
eign talent recruitment programs? Very, very quickly.
Mr. MARTIN. Yes, that has proved helpful, the certification.
Mr. BABIN. Yes. OK.
Mr. MARTIN. Yes, sir.
Mr. BABIN. All right. Thank you very much. And I’m out of time.
Thank you.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Mr. Babin.
110
I will now yield 5 minutes to the distinguished Congresswoman
from Colorado, Ms. Caraveo.
Ms. CARAVEO. Thank you, sir. And thank you for—to the wit-
nesses today for being here. Americans certainly deserve full trans-
parency and accountability of our science agencies, so I appreciate
and support the work that you all do.
I wanted to briefly highlight a program that I recently learned
about, the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Student AI
Teaming, which is being led by the University of Colorado at Boul-
der. The institute is dedicated to transforming classrooms into
more effective, engaging, and equitable learning environments to
help realize the grand challenge of education for all by leading the
Nation toward a future where all students, especially those with
identities that are underrepresented in STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics), routinely participate in rich and re-
warding collaborative learning experiences.
As a Latina in STEM and as the aunt of a young STEM enthu-
siast, learning about programs like these serve as a reminder of
how critical funding and oversight for our science agencies is now
and for generations to come.
So for Inspector General Lerner, has your office learned—has
your office recently assessed NSF’s efforts to enhance inclusivity
amongst agency grant recipients and research initiatives? And if
so, can you please share some of your findings?
Ms. LERNER. At this point, we don’t have any recent work on
that topic, but it is an area that we have included in our manage-
ment challenges. And as we formulate our audit plan for the up-
coming year, we will hope to focus some resources on that.
Ms. CARAVEO. I appreciate that plan, and I’m looking forward to
what you find there.
As a follow up for the rest of the panel, do your offices have any
plans to conduct any further audits related to inclusivity in any
portion of NSF’s research agenda?
Mr. O’DONNELL. I will——
Mr. MARTIN. Go ahead, Sean.
Mr. O’DONNELL. I pushed it first.
Mr. MARTIN. Did you win? Go ahead.
Mr. O’DONNELL. Yes. So for us for the last 3 years, environ-
mental justice—and that’s what matters at the EPA. Environ-
mental justice has been a challenge that we’ve identified. And I
will tell you, I have personally spoken with the head of the Office
of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights to make the
point that the $3 billion that they have to give through the IRA
is not about who the recipient is. It’s about who the beneficiaries
are. Environmental justice is about the beneficiaries, and we need
to make sure that we have the internal controls that are protecting
the funds that achieve the goals of those programs.
Mr. MARTIN. Congresswoman——
Ms. CARAVEO. Mr. Martin, yes?
Mr. MARTIN [continuing]. Just to note that the Office of Inspector
General at NASA just recently opened an audit looking at the effec-
tiveness of the agency’s STEM efforts. They invest about $108—ex-
cuse me, $108—$108 million per year in STEM, and so we’re going
to assess the effectiveness of their efforts.
111
Ms. CARAVEO. That’s great, in particular, given that my niece is
Latina, and she is interested in a future at NASA, I’m glad to hear
about those plans.
And speaking of NASA, I did have a kind of separate question
for you, Inspector General Martin. Based on your office’s work, do
you believe NASA’s management of contractor performance has im-
proved in—over time? Colorado has a big aerospace industry with
several NASA contractors based out of the State, and so this inter-
ests me.
Mr. MARTIN. I think it ebbs and flows. It’s program-specific, the
effectiveness of their contract oversight and project management.
Ms. CARAVEO. And what are kind of future plans for oversight of
it?
Mr. MARTIN. Well, the IG’s Office, we’re involved in all the major
programs, particularly the high-profile programs involved in the
Artemis missions——
Ms. CARAVEO. Perfect.
Mr. MARTIN [continuing]. The rocket, the capsule, the ground in-
frastructure. We’re keeping tabs on all of those.
Ms. CARAVEO. Wonderful. I appreciate that, and I yield back my
time.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Ms. Caraveo.
We’ll go next to the gentlewoman from Oklahoma, Mrs. Bice.
You’re recognized for 5 minutes.
Mrs. BICE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for the wit-
nesses for being here.
First, Ms. Donaldson, you shocked me with your numbers that
you stated earlier that Fiscal Year 2022 DOE spend was $44 bil-
lion, and because of the programs that were passed last year,
you’re looking at a $400 billion budget for the Department of En-
ergy. And not as frightening, given that a lot of those dollars are
grant dollars.
And my first question is for any of the panelists, and that is do
you believe that there is an issue with the grant awarding process,
given that we have so many instances of grant fraud that have
been identified through your through agencies? And the reason I
bring this up is an important one. I’m extremely excited to be a
Member of this Committee for my second term, but I’m also a new
Committee Member on the Appropriations Committee. And as I re-
call, Congress has the power of the purse. And I believe that we
have abdicated that responsibility to agencies through this grant
awarding program, you know, across the board. And we’re finding
fraud, taxpayer fraud across the board. So I’d love maybe a little
bit of insight about those grant programs that you all are over-
seeing. Open to anyone.
Mr. MARTIN. Do you want to run down the line?
Mrs. BICE. Quickly, sure.
Mr. MARTIN. Yes, I think what—yes, I think we’ve seen histori-
cally that the grant oversight capacity at our individual agencies
is way underfunded, and so they don’t conduct—because of the
bandwidth issue, the contracting officers at the agency don’t have
enough hours in the day. They’re pushing the money out they an-
nually appropriated each year.
112
And second, we’ve seen that some universities don’t conduct ap-
propriate due diligence over the grants that are coming to the fac-
ulty and the researchers at their universities.
Ms. LERNER. I think there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, so I’ll just
give you the perspective from NSF. In the 13 years that I’ve been
there, I’ve seen real improvements in the amount and sophistica-
tion of the oversight the agency provides to its—of its recipients
outside of my office, but they are still, you know, hard-pressed be-
cause of the limitations on funding that they have for that to touch
as many things as would be ideal. But real progress has been
made, but progress remains.
Mrs. BICE. Anyone additional wanted to comment on that, or I
can move forward? Because I do have another question.
Mr. O’DONNELL. I would just briefly add, and I want to amplify
some concerns, the IIJA gave the EPA $60 billion. Most of that is
going through familiar funding mechanisms like State Revolving
Funds. And so what we see are capacity issues at both the distribu-
tion and the recipients. But the IRA gave the EPA over $40 billion
for entirely new programs that are going to entirely new recipients.
And unfortunately for us, I think the biggest risk is Congress didn’t
fund oversight of this. And I gave one example recently of the Envi-
ronmental Justice Office, which went from 12 components of about
$12 million to now one component with $3 billion, and that’s——
Mrs. BICE. And no oversight.
Mr. O’DONNELL. I’m going to steal a term from Teri Donaldson.
That’s faster money to newer recipients and we are very concerned
about that and the ability to do effective oversight of it.
Mrs. BICE. Thank you for that, appreciate it.
To pivot for a moment, this is going to be directed at Ms. Donald-
son. Secretary Granholm was a former board member of Proterra,
which was an electric bus company before joining the Department.
It is listed on her ethics agreement as a covered relationship for
the first year under the Federal regulations and 2 years under the
Biden ethics pledge. She was required to divest her stock within 6
months of becoming Secretary. The obligations require Secretary
Granholm to be recused from matters involving Proterra or those
that could directly and predictably benefit them. Yet she was per-
sonally involved in the DOE’s SuperTruck 3 program that ulti-
mately saw the Department hand out $80 million under the pro-
gram. At least three of these recipients of SuperTruck 3 grants an-
nounced personally by her at a public event with the words of $80
million are companies with ties to Proterra. Were you aware of
this?
Ms. DONALDSON. I was aware of part of that. I’m not sure that
all of what you just said was familiar to me.
Mrs. BICE. OK. Daimler, for instance, received $25 million in
SuperTruck—in a SuperTruck 3 grant. The company has made
multiple large investments in Proterra and created exclusive part-
ner partnerships between Daimler Commercial Vehicle divisions
and Proterra. While announcing its deal to go public, which in-
volved in investment of more than $400 million from a group led
by Daimler Trucks, Proterra described the company as a strategic
partner. Do you think there’s a conflict of interest there, Ms. Don-
aldson?
113
Ms. DONALDSON. I think whether or not there’s a conflict would
depend on applying the law to it. So depending on the timing of
that—so if you divest and then participate, there may not be a con-
flict. So we do occasionally get items like that in the door. We lay
out the legal framework. And then the answer emerges on the
other side, sometimes based on timing.
Mrs. BICE. But this was—some of this information, admittedly,
you are not aware of. Is that correct?
Ms. DONALDSON. That’s—I—part of that. I was not aware of the
detail of it.
Mrs. BICE. OK. My time has expired. Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congresswoman Bice.
We’ll go next to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania, Ms. Lee.
You’re recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. LEE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Western Pennsylvania, where I serve, has a rich history of rely-
ing heavily on the hard work and dedication of its workforce. Every
dollar we spend is hard earned. So it feels silly that we’re here try-
ing to scrutinize funding that will support further American leader-
ship in scientific innovation and deployment when last time I
checked, the Department of Defense has consistently failed its an-
nual audits. I want to address how strong worker protections
through the IGs at agencies like the ones you represent will sup-
port further American leadership in scientific innovation and de-
ployment.
So my first question is directed to Mr. O’Donnell. With the in-
vestments of the IRA, how does your office help to ensure that your
agency is operating efficiently and effectively, while also upholding
their commitment to worker protections?
Mr. O’DONNELL. So, as I mentioned, we did not get any funding
to oversight IRA spending. I can tell you that with respect to IIJA
spending, we already have planned a project on the agency’s deci-
sionmaking with respect to Build America, Buy America (BABA)
provisions. And when we start doing inspections of project sites, it
will include BABA checklists, Davis Bacon protections, and the
like. These are, I think, critical when the government is paying for
something. The government wants to get what it’s paid for, and we
believe that, too.
Ms. LEE. Thank you. Can you discuss more about the success of
your agency’s human resources policies and practices that finan-
cially reward whistleblowers and support of the protection of sci-
entific energy—or integrity? Excuse me.
Mr. O’DONNELL. Thank you. Scientific integrity is always an
issue at the EPA because I think, unlike a lot of agencies, it does
science and it makes decisions based on science. In a series of re-
ports, we’ve raised concerns about the agency’s scientific integrity
policy and I think, more importantly, its practice of not reporting
allegations of scientific integrity or loss of scientific integrity to us.
We have to find these sort of coincidentally.
And so we are working with the agency to—as it’s revising its
scientific integrity policy, to make sure that it recognizes the
unique, independent, and objective role of the EPA OIG in inves-
tigating those allegations. So that for us is very important.
114
And then with respect to whistleblowing, I can tell you that I am
instituting a policy, a program at the EPA OIG under 5 USC
(United States Code)—I want to say 4712, but please don’t quote
me, where we will reward EPA whistleblowers, employees who
come to us with identifiable cost savings of fraud, waste, and
abuse.
Ms. LEE. Thank you. Finally, for you, Mr. O’Donnell, can you dis-
cuss how existing protocols supported and strengthened the inves-
tigations by your office of the Newton County superfund site?
Mr. O’DONNELL. Can I get back to you on the Newton superfund
site? We have looked at a number of superfund sites. For us, a big
thrust of that is in communicating to stakeholders in the commu-
nity on the risks. And in fact, I can tell you, we are releasing a
report. It’s on the 35th Avenue site in Alabama, but it really
speaks to the EPA’s ability or lack of ability to speak to the cumu-
lative risks that are involved in a superfund site, air, water, land.
Ms. LEE. Thank you. Ms. Lerner, how do you ensure that agency
leaders are held accountable to make directorates like the new Di-
rectorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships more effi-
cient in their formulation and implementation?
Ms. LERNER. We engage early and often, especially when word of
the new directorate, you know, came through. We watch the agen-
cy’s efforts. We—and we ensure that the thoughts of efficiency and
effectiveness and actions that can help prevent fraud are at the
front of their minds as they plan. And we provide proactive advice
as we can, like the Other Transactions Authority report I men-
tioned earlier. So we engage early and often with them, as appro-
priate, while maintaining our independence.
Ms. LEE. OK. In fact, very quickly for Mr. Soskin, from the finan-
cial impact of procurement and grant fraud investigations since
2017, how can oversight be improved to ensure as much funding
as possible reaches our communities through the various programs
and grant opportunities like the EPA’s Clean School Bus program,
and what steps are you taking to address any areas for improve-
ment?
Mr. SOSKIN. One of the findings in our recent audits of the De-
partment’s oversight of its procurement and contracts is the need
for the Department to hire and retain and effectively train con-
tracting officers and contracting officer representatives so that they
have enough to pay attention to each of their procurement initia-
tives and so that they have the training required to provide over-
sight of those initiatives. And so in connection with their procure-
ment that’s an important element for the Department to pay atten-
tion to.
Ms. LEE. Thank you. Thank you to the panel. And thank you,
Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congresswoman Lee.
We’ll go next to the gentleman from New York, Mr. Williams.
You are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. WILLIAMS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
On April 5, Mr. Obernolte and I sent a letter to the Secretary
of Energy, and we’re requesting more information about the ramp-
ant culture of stock trading and total disregard for the conflict-of-
interest laws. As I look over our letter, just to quote that hundreds
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of Department of Energy employees, including one-third of the De-
partment’s senior employees, continue to hold stocks and other as-
sets related to their official work, despite receiving notices from
ethics officials, and there are literally hundreds of violations and
thousands and thousands of transactions.
Inspector General Donaldson, I’d like to acknowledge your testi-
mony before the House Oversight Committee this week. And you
mentioned the size and scale of the increased funding to the DOE
also in your opening comments today. I’m interested in how that
may have played a role here. Specifically, this expanded budget,
how exactly in your opinion has this contributed to this increase in
conflict-of-interest trades and potential ethics violations?
Ms. DONALDSON. Well, first, I would point out that the conduct
that you’re describing may not constitute an ethical violation. So
the Department of Energy’s regulations of these activities focus on
a specific matter. So if you’re employed at the Department of En-
ergy, you can in fact hold stock for a particular company, as long
as you don’t work on a matter that impacts that company directly.
So it’s focused on the matter, not on the holding of the stock itself.
And then there’s a recusal mechanism. In the event something
comes in front of you, you recuse and step away from it.
Mr. WILLIAMS. My understanding from the reports—and thank
you for that clarification. But my understanding from the reports
is that there do appear to be a number of cases where matters be-
fore specific even leaders and employees of the Department of En-
ergy did hold stocks that would put them in a pretty clear conflict.
Could you comment about your investigation and maybe your re-
sponse to Mr. Obernolte and I’s letter?
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, we do work on investigations that look like
this, but the way this process works is that those notices—these
were mentioned in The Wall Street Journal articles—are sent out
prophylactically. So if you hold stock in Exxon, you may get—and
you’re employed at the Department of Energy, you will get a notice
that says, make sure you’re not working on anything impacting
Exxon. It’s not a notice that you violated the law. It’s sort of a pro-
phylactic, be careful sort of notice. So I think there’s some confu-
sion in what those notices actually mean——
Mr. WILLIAMS. So——
Ms. DONALDSON [continuing]. Which is inflating those numbers
a bit.
Mr. WILLIAMS. OK. So when I was a junior banker very briefly,
the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) certainly regulated
our ability to make trades or to hold stocks related to any of the
transactions that we might be working on. And this was just part
of that—I guess part of the banking charter, and there’s a whole
compliance organization around that to ensure that kind of compli-
ance. And so literally, I could not even buy or sell stocks as an em-
ployee of the bank without prior approval. It seems in this case
that, you know, either the rules and laws need to be clarified or
strengthened or perhaps there’s room for additional investigation.
Which direction is your office going with these—with this news re-
port and with the letter and information that we’ve requested?
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, we are in fact launching a project looking
at conflict-of-interest protections across Federal agencies because
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different agencies have different regulations with different impacts.
So it is possible that there are—well, there are, you know, different
sorts of ways of approaching it, and some are more layered and
some do focus on the holding of the stock if your agency partici-
pates in regulating that entity. So there’s different ways to come
at it. We don’t have a project that I can tell you what the results
are yet because we’re just launching that, but it is an area that in-
terests me.
Mr. WILLIAMS. Any comment about Mr. Obernolte and I’s letter,
its receipt, and actions being taken in your office?
Ms. DONALDSON. It’s an—again, it’s an area that interests me. I
am not aware of sort of a specific volume of cases that violate these
rules. We have a pretty steady flow of allegations coming in. Some
of them turn out to be a problem, and some turn out to be notices
that were innocently sent and aren’t a problem.
Mr. WILLIAMS. There’s—and I know my time’s up. There’s var-
ious degrees of smiles on your colleagues’ faces, which indicates
that perhaps the information that I need is—you’re not able to
really comment on at this time, so I will—my time’s up. Thank you.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congressman Williams.
Next, we’ll go to the gentleman also from New York, Mr. Bow-
man. You are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. BOWMAN. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. Good morning,
everyone. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you for
your testimony.
I would love to see Science, Technology, and Innovation Centers
built all over this country, particularly in historically marginalized
rural and urban communities. And I believe that the CHIPS and
Science Act gives us the opportunity to do that. However, there’s
a lack of infrastructure in place for some of the historically
marginalized communities to identify, track, and then go after the
resources that are available as part of the CHIPS and Science Act.
My question is for everyone, and we can start to my left and go
all the way down the line. Do your offices intend to assess how well
agencies ensure equitable access to Federal funding opportunities?
And what do previous audits tell us about how agencies can be bet-
ter at this?
Mr. MARTIN. So specifically, NASA did not receive any CHIPS
Act funding on that. But you know, NASA has its 10 centers across
the country, Huntsville, Alabama; Johnson Space Center, et cetera,
where the bulk of their, you know, civilian workforce and many of
their contractors are. So I’ll pass to the folks who actually got
CHIPS funding.
Mr. BOWMAN. All right. Thanks.
Mr. MARTIN. Thank you.
Ms. LERNER. NSF did receive CHIPS funding, and it has many
projects underway to address the issues that you raised. And I
know that those will be the focus of our audit oversight in the fu-
ture.
The work that I can point to right now that we’re—we’ve done
that’s trying to improve people’s ability where—in—the ability of
institutions that have received limited funds from Federal research
agencies is our work looking at the EPSCoR program and trying
to help NSF help its recipients do a better job of managing their
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money and managing their subrecipients, some of whom have even
less experience than they do in managing Federal funds.
Mr. BOWMAN. Thank you.
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, sir. So the Department of Energy has been
authorized to receive funds under CHIPS, but it has not yet been
appropriated. They’re going to be getting it in smaller allotments
through the appropriations process. So I am situated more simi-
larly to the first IG who answered this question.
Mr. SOSKIN. DOT, like NASA, did not receive any CHIPS Act
funding. We are aware of our department’s ongoing efforts to ex-
pand its grants to University Transportation Centers and include
more UTCs in those programs. I anticipate that’s one activity by
the Department that will result in greater geographical reach. I
would also note that the statutory requirements in many of the De-
partment’s grant programs include both a rural and an urban
breakdown, as was referenced in your question.
Mr. BOWMAN. OK.
Mr. O’DONNELL. While EPA did not receive CHIPS Act money,
it obviously received money across the board, IIJA and IRA. And
of course the issue of environmental justice animates almost every
aspect of what the EPA does. And I think if you looked at our re-
ports, you’ll see that many of them, even when they’re not directed
toward environmental justice, like, for example, our cybersecurity
report, we still do touch on what are the consequences to commu-
nities like you say. So, for example, in cybersecurity, we found that
it was a smaller, rural type of ones in disadvantaged communities
that have not made it. And, you know, our portfolio on this issue
on the EPA’s ability and its subrecipients to make sure that dis-
advantaged communities participate is quite vast. And, you know,
I’d be happy to have my staff meet with yours to share with you
our great work in this subject.
Mr. BOWMAN. Absolutely. I appreciate that. Thank you.
My next question is for Inspector General Lerner. Last year, your
office highlighted the need to address barriers and growing re-
search capacity for emerging research institutions as a top manage-
ment challenge. This is especially important for artificial intel-
ligence. When large language models have shifted the landscape of
cutting-edge research from universities to private labs backed by
cloud giants, the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), which
NSF and OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy) are col-
laborating on, is an opportunity for us to level the playing field and
democratize who can conduct cutting-edge AI research. How do you
think public institutions like the NAIRR or other programs that
were created or expanded as part of the CHIPS and Science Act
could help NSF address disparities in research capacity?
Ms. LERNER. I believe that there are many things that those in-
stitutions could do sharing their real life experience of trying to
bring new people into this immediate and growing conversation
will help NSF do a better job at dispensing its funds. So I think
that the strong connections that NSF has with institutions will
make both entities’ response to this new, you know, growing area
of interest stronger.
Mr. BOWMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congressman Bowman.
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We’ll go next to the gentleman from Tennessee. Mr.
Fleischmann, you’re recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. FLEISCHMANN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I wish to
thank all of the panel. I know your job as Inspectors General is ex-
tremely, extremely difficult and important, so thanks to each and
every one of you.
Well, as you may or may not be aware, I am the Chairman of
the Energy and Water Subcommittee on Appropriations. I’ve been
privileged to ask to come back to the Science Committee by the
Chairman, so glad to serve here. I just have one question. And I
do believe, General Donaldson, you’ve—may have already touched
on this, but—in your previous answers, but in your testimony, you
stated that Congress has authorized $67 billion for the Department
of Energy through the CHIPS and Science Act, as well as appro-
priated $62 billion in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Please describe, if you will, the actions your office is taking to pre-
vent fraud and waste in these programs. Thank you.
Ms. DONALDSON. So one of the actions we’re taking is to be over
here and talking to appropriators so that we can be more appro-
priately funded to do the work. But while that is going on, we’ve
launched a large-scale data acquisition and monitoring project
which will generate leads for audits and inspections. We’ve had ap-
proximately 30 meetings with the Department. We’re not allowed
to consult or advise, but we ask a ton of questions, a lot of them
about the 71 new programs. So we’re actively in the coordinating
and planning. Mr. Soskin and I chair the group of Inspectors Gen-
eral that received funding under IIJA, so we meet every month
with the other Inspectors General, share best practices. So we’re
doing everything that we can, given our underfunded status.
Mr. FLEISCHMANN. Thank you for your answer, and I’ll yield
back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Mr. Fleischmann.
We’ll go next to the gentleman from Florida, Mr. Frost. You are
recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. FROST. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We’re a nation recovering
from a pandemic, facing threats abroad, and managing an existen-
tial climate crisis. Such big problems require big solutions and so-
lutions that can’t just be left up to the States. Our Federal agencies
can take on these challenges, and I want to thank you all for your
dedication to ensuring that the billions of dollars flowing through
these agencies move as efficiently and effectively as possible to the
important projects they fund.
For example, in—Ms. Lerner, in your testimony, you mentioned
that NSF funds over 12,000 grants involving over 350,000 re-
searchers. I’d like to know what steps does—what steps do your of-
fice take to ensure the legitimacy of those researchers?
Ms. LERNER. NSF has a first-class process for reviewing pro-
posals that come in, for investigative—for merit. They have two
principles, intellectual merit and broader impacts that they focus
on. And so their focus is on the quality of the research presented.
There are vetting rules, you know, that relate to NSF’s own inter-
nal employees. But the focus of the awards that NSF makes is on
the research that’s proposed.
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Mr. FROST. Got you. Thank you. You know, my State of Florida
has received over 1,700 of those grants, which include almost 200
alone for the University of Central Florida (UCF) in my district. Go
Knights. One grantee in my district, Dr. Mindy Shoss, who my of-
fice recently connected with, Professor Shoss is an industrial psy-
chologist, teacher, and researcher at UCF-go Knights—where—
when the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) reported a 400 per-
cent increase in cyber attacks in 2020, Professor Shoss actually
used this grant from NSF to analyze employee behaviors for weak
spots. And this was research that could secure an incredible
amount of personal and commercial data. All of that came from a
$170,000 NSF grant.
Cybersecurity also means America working toward technological
independence. And we can thank that CHIPS and Science Act for
addressing the semiconductor shortage while creating 44,000 jobs
in just 6 months. That includes 200 semiconductor jobs just south
of my district in Kissimmee at a really cool place I recently just vis-
ited called NeoCity, which is a growing technical hub in central
Florida. Sensitive research and technology has to be safeguarded.
And so, Ms. Lerner, in your testimony you mentioned working
with NSF’s Chief of Research Security. Could you elaborate on how
your office works to protect sensitive scientific information?
Ms. LERNER. Absolutely. We work closely with the CRSSP (Chief
Research Officer for Research Security, Strategy, and Policy) as
she’s referred to, to address issues, allegations relating to foreign
affiliations that were undisclosed in NSF-funded research and
other research security matters. And the CRSSP handles the man-
agement aspects of those. Our office is there to look at potentially
criminal behavior. And so—because sometimes complaints come to
us that need to go to her. Sometimes things come to us that need
to come to her that need to go to us, so that’s why we work really
carefully together.
Mr. FROST. Thank you. Mr. Martin, I’ve made multiple trips to
Cape Canaveral. I was born and raised in Orlando. I grew up
standing in my backyard seeing shuttles and tons of different, you
know, things go into space. And I also grew up seeing the Cape’s
transformation through the success of NASA’s successful public-pri-
vate partnerships, partnerships that have revitalized Florida’s
Space Coast, while delivering benefits for Americans across the
country from better weather forecasting to rural internet access. I
actually just saw the TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring
Pollution) launch, which was really exciting.
Mr. Martin, how does your office work to make sure that sen-
sitive, valuable aerospace technologies move securely within these
partnerships and also within partnerships with other international
space agencies?
Mr. MARTIN. So first off, go NASA. No, we have excellent co-
operation with NASA’s security force. And we do—as you pointed
out, we do a lot of work and increasingly with our international
partners. And so we are key on security for both the Kennedy
Space Center itself and also vetting any international visitors to
NASA facilities.
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Mr. FROST. Got you. Thank you so much, Mr. Martin. Yes, go
NASA. If you want to send a Member to space, let me know. And,
you know, I’ll say—it was a program.
President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget includes millions for
underfunded IG offices. And, you know, I’m sure we could all agree
with the President that we need more funding for our IG offices to
ensure that this money is being spent correctly and efficiently, and
that’s the work y’all have been doing. I appreciate you coming in
today. You’ve saved the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars
and insured that the money’s going toward the big solutions that
we need with the big problems we’re facing. Thank you so much.
I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congressman Frost.
We will go next to the gentlewoman from New York, Ms. Tenney.
You’re recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. TENNEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member,
for having this hearing. And thank you to the witnesses for coming
in today and for what you do to try to provide some oversight for
spending.
And this is—the inflation that is being felt by Americans in my
district is very real. I—upstate New York, we have—are the high-
est taxed State in the Nation now. We’ve taken over the Chair-
man’s State as No. 1. We have huge costs. We’re facing cata-
strophic energy policy in my opinion that’s coming to the State, and
that’s being felt by our farmers in the largest agricultural district
in the Northeast, the largest dairy district in the Northeast, and
only three nuclear power plants left in the entire State with emis-
sion-free baseload power to try to sustain us when we go to a zero
fossil fuel-based system in New York very soon.
But we are facing $31 trillion in debt. The Federal Government
has lost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, as you noted, to
fraud, abuse and waste. And I was looking through some of your
reports here. While most of this, I understand, doesn’t come under
this Committee’s jurisdiction, we have the unemployment payroll
protection plan. Those are under the COVID-administrated funds
and SBA (Small Business Administration), $7 billion in military
equipment left to the Taliban, among many of these other things.
But as was recently discovered in the Department of Energy’s Of-
fice of Science failed to—that they failed to report $56 million in
awards to for-profit research organizations. Further, hundreds of
Department of Energy employees, including a third of senior em-
ployees, hold stock in companies directly under their jurisdiction,
leading to potentially conflicts of interests. In addition, the Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency recently noted that its PFBS—and I
know those are their perfluorobutane sulfonic—I can’t put the word
out there—acidity—toxicity assessment did not follow scientific in-
tegrity standards, rendering the report’s contents unusable. And
then, to top it all off, the EPA has been unable to track the impact
of its pandemic grants, calling into question its ability to conduct
basic due diligence and track the fraud, abuse, and waste with
those funds.
With the Inflation Reduction Act, which Mr. Fleischmann—and
you indicated it was $62 billion, the $67 billion infrastructure bill,
and all of these moneys going into in a—de facto in a sense, a slush
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fund for the Biden Administration to implement the Green New
Deal. And let me be clear, the IRA was touted as the Green New
Deal, the biggest climate—the biggest green energy bill ever in the
history of the United States before they talked about the Inflation
Reduction Act. Apparently, inflation is tough to get rid of when you
keep spending.
But it is more important now that Congress does something
about stopping this wasteful spending. And there’s no greater obli-
gation on our part to look to you as our Inspectors General to say
we have to control and figure out what’s going on with taxpayer
dollars, especially where we have such high taxes and such high
inflation.
So I have a number of questions. I want to open this up to, I
guess, some—maybe Ms. Donaldson on this teleworking policies
that have impacted the prevalence of fraud, abuse, and waste, have
they impacted waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars? And
has it changed your oversight capacity by not having people in the
office to actually see and touch and be there to make account-
ability?
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Could you turn your mic on?
Ms. TENNEY. Your mic on, yes, thanks.
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, thank you. Sorry. The Department of En-
ergy has just initiated a study of the impacts on teleworking, so we
don’t have any published materials to talk about.
Ms. TENNEY. Well, let me ask you, what’s your personal opinion
on that? I mean, do you think people should be coming back to
work, or do you think that we need to continue this telecommuting
now that the pandemic has been declared over by our President
some time ago?
Ms. DONALDSON. Well, I can tell you what’s going on in my shop,
and I think it’s working well. So we do allow maximum teleworking
but encourage people to come in more often than those require-
ments. And we have a lot of people coming in 3, 4, and even 5 days
a week. So we’re seeing—even though it’s not a forced march, we’re
seeing a migration back to the office, which I think is very valu-
able.
Ms. TENNEY. But has this impacted your ability to do oversight?
Because in your documents here, you’ve outlined there’s a number
of issues we need help with.
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, I would say the greater impact is that I
don’t have the funds to hire people. My existing staff are working
very hard in a maximum teleworking capacity.
Ms. TENNEY. Thank you. Mr. Martin, I just wanted to ask on
NASA, and thank you for the work that you do and for putting this
out, but we have seen the methodologies and some failures in
project management, which were indicated in one of the reports.
For example, the James Webb telescope took 20 years to build, it
was supposed to be $1 billion, ended up being $10 billion. How do
we solve this issue? And I think I’m running out of time, but if you
may answer. Is there a methodology we could change or use to
make NASA more efficient, more effective, and accountable to the
taxpayers? And we love what you do, but I’m just—this is a huge
issue.
122
Mr. MARTIN. It is a huge issue. And NASA has been struggling,
frankly, for decades. I think they need to do best—better cost esti-
mation at the front end. You mentioned the James Webb Space
Telescope, pitched as a $1 billion, 10-year project, morphed into a
$10 billion, 20-year project. And let me make a point. The fact is
$10 billion worth of Webb Space Telescope, it may be worth $10 bil-
lion, but when you pitch it as a $1 billion project and manage it
and it balloons $9 billion, you’ve pushed out other science that
could be undertaken, other opportunities for space exploration, so
NASA contract management and project management.
Ms. TENNEY. My time has expired. But maybe offline you could
just give me an answer of what—how we can improve the meth-
odologies of NASA to make it more efficient and to meet some of
the targets that we have. Thanks. Thank you very much. Thank
you to everyone.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congresswoman Tenney.
We’ll go next to the gentleman also from New York. Mr. Tonko,
you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. TONKO. Thank you. And I thank Chair Obernolte and Rank-
ing Member Lofgren for hosting the hearing today and certainly to
our witnesses for your appearance.
I believe that big problems absolutely require big solutions, from
the climate crisis that was ignored for about 4 years and crumbling
infrastructure to our global competitiveness in advanced manufac-
turing, the American people need for us to lead. And so in the
117th Congress, that is exactly what we did, lofty investments for
lofty challenges, monumental pieces of legislation, once-in-a-genera-
tion investments that were signed into law by President Biden.
And now we have passed the baton to our distinguished panelists
to finish the job on behalf of all Americans. My colleagues and I
in Congress will be watching and doing our part to make certain
your agencies have the necessary support to make the most of
these landmark pieces of legislation.
Let me begin with scientific integrity. I believe that it’s a corner-
stone of Federal scientific activities and something that I’ve made
a priority during my time in Congress by authorizing the Scientific
Integrity Act. What do you all believe is the appropriate role for
OIGs in defending scientific integrity in Federal agencies and re-
sponding to alleged violations of agency scientific integrity policies?
And this is a question for each and every one of you. Who would
like to start? Mr. O’Donnell?
Mr. O’DONNELL. I will start. As I said earlier, EPA is an agency
that relies on science in making its decisions. It does science inter-
nally, and I think that its struggles with allegations of loss of sci-
entific integrity, which are well documented in part by us.
One of the hurdles that we experienced at the EPA is that we
are not finding out about allegations of loss of scientific integrity
except by coincidence. During our review of the PFBS toxicity as-
sessment, we find out that senior officials in the agency know that
there were allegations of misconduct, but we were not told about
it. They saw this with respect to dicamba, ethylene oxide. It is a
recurring problem.
We have been working for the last 2 years with the agency to try
and make clear our role. And I believe agency policy speaks to this,
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that we are the only independent agency or a unit in the agency
that can guarantee the confidentiality of witnesses and whistle-
blowers that come to us, and that the agency needs to remember
to bring us those allegations as quickly as possible because—I say
this to them all the time. The American people need to believe
you’re acting with integrity, not just that you are, but they believe
it. And they believe it because we act independently to show that
you’re acting with integrity.
Mr. TONKO. Mr. Soskin, do you have any comments in that re-
gard?
Mr. SOSKIN. Yes, we are dedicated to pursuing any and all alle-
gations that are brought to us and fall within our jurisdiction, par-
ticularly related to fraud or of criminal activity. And while the De-
partment of Transportation is not principally a science agency, we
did highlight in our top management challenges report this year
the important need for the Department to make its decisions re-
lated to its safety mission, and promotion of innovation in our
transportation system, based on good data and to be robust in its
processes to identify and acquire the data that it needs to make
sure its decisionmaking is data-driven.
Mr. TONKO. Thank you. Ms. Donaldson, please?
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, so the Office of Inspector General pri-
marily is in a responsive mode, so we respond to specific allega-
tions. I don’t have any ongoing projects that look at scientific integ-
rity writ large. So an allegation comes in, we’ll look at it, decide
what’s happened, criminal, civil, whatever it may be.
Mr. TONKO. Thank you. And Ms. Lerner?
Ms. LERNER. So NSF funds research, but none of our employees
actually conduct science, so we don’t have specific scientific integ-
rity responsibilities. But we do conduct oversight of people who re-
ceive NSF funding. We conduct research misconduct investigations
when there are allegations of fabrication, falsification, or plagia-
rism in NSF-funded research. And that’s how we promote research
integrity.
Mr. TONKO. And thank you. And, Mr. Martin, please?
Mr. MARTIN. Right. I think we’re much more similar to Ms. Don-
aldson, IG Donaldson. We’re in a reactive mode. When allegations
are raised at the Office of Inspector General, we coordinate closely
with the Department itself.
Mr. TONKO. OK. And perhaps since Mr. O’Donnell had the most
to say on this topic, how can the OIG coordinate with scientific in-
tegrity officials and other agency leaders to preserve scientific in-
tegrity and enhance scientific integrity best practices?
Mr. O’DONNELL. Thank you. As I said, for the last 2 years, we’ve
been working with the Scientific Integrity Office to try and insti-
tute coordination procedures exactly like you are speaking to, to en-
sure that we’re notified of these. And I understand for my col-
leagues, for them, it’s mostly reactive, but for us, we are proactive.
We hold whistleblower events. We speak to scientific integrity
issues to the agency, and we remind employees that we can help
them if there are allegations of misconduct. And in fact, I stood up
an administrative investigations directorate that is absolutely full
in its docket with scientific integrity allegation issues. And so when
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we speak on those issues, we really are being, I think, proactive in
the future.
Mr. TONKO. And have they been longstanding?
Mr. O’DONNELL. The complaints?
Mr. TONKO. Or the concerns that you expressed today, have they
been longstanding?
Mr. O’DONNELL. Oh, those concerns are very longstanding.
Mr. TONKO. OK. Thank you. I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Mr. Tonko.
We will go next to the gentleman from Indiana. Mr. Baird, you
are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. BAIRD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I appreciate all the
witnesses being here today, appreciate your testimony.
And so the questions I have deal with the office—Ms. Donaldson,
I’m going to direct this to you—conduct oversight on classified pro-
grams at the Department of Energy. But instead, the oversight of
classified programs at the Department of Energy is conducted by
an internal unit known as the Enterprise Associates. And so your
office conducts oversight of Enterprise Associates, essentially, to
grade their work. So can you please explain to us how your office
does not conduct oversight if you believe that this should be
changed?
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Microphone, please.
Ms. DONALDSON. Sorry about that. So at the Department of En-
ergy, we do split this work. But—so my shop does the cybersecurity
reviews on the non-class system. And then the Office of Enterprise
Assessments does very similar work in connection with the classi-
fied systems. The way that we interact, we do conduct oversight of
the Office of Enterprise Assessments, so there’s a series of meet-
ings reviewing the work. So it’s more tightly woven than you might
think.
Others have asked me whether or not my shop should take over
the cybersecurity reviews for the classified system. Right now, as
underfunded as we are, that would be a challenge, but that’s cer-
tainly possible in the future.
Mr. BAIRD. Can you give me some idea how often you do that?
Is this an annual review? Is it an annual review or periodic or
whatever?
Ms. DONALDSON. So it works in two ways. There is a required
annual review, and then there are whatever other projects we do
along the way that are designed and done in parallel to the annual
review.
Mr. BAIRD. Thank you.
Ms. DONALDSON. You’re welcome.
Mr. BAIRD. So, Ms. Lerner, I’m going to move to you next. You
know, the Antarctic is not claimed as a territory by any nation.
Therefore, international implications exist in the implementation
and enforcement of laws. Can you provide the Committee with the
main international challenges that have arisen surrounding this
issue?
Ms. LERNER. At this point, I think the two that I’m aware of deal
with, you know, if a criminal act occurs in Antarctica, you know,
who has jurisdiction over the investigation of that, whether—if it
occurs in a U.S.-funded research base, is that the United States’ re-
125
sponsibility, or are there other nations that could exert respon-
sive—you know, over—responsibility for that investigation?
And the second issue is if someone is found to have committed
a crime and needs to be removed from Antarctica, typically
they’re—they leave Antarctica and travel out through New Zea-
land. And there are challenges of moving a prisoner through New
Zealand that need to be worked out.
Mr. BAIRD. So could you elaborate a little bit on your relationship
with the United Nations in that regard?
Ms. LERNER. I have none. I’m happy to talk to anyone about
these matters, but this would be, I think, more NSF’s responsibility
as the manager of the program to engage with, you know, all the
Department of State, the United—you know, and the Government
of New Zealand and sort these issues out.
Mr. BAIRD. Thank you. Let’s take a different approach. The main
law enforcement officer is deputized through the special deputy
marshals?
Ms. LERNER. Yes.
Mr. BAIRD. Has the IG coordinated with the Deputy Marshals
Service? And can you provide the Committee with more details on
the relationship of NSF and OIG and how that maintains a rela-
tionship with the Marshals Service?
Ms. LERNER. We have a strong relationship with NSF, and in
fact, NSF supported our sending a team of three, one auditor and
two investigators, down to Antarctica in February. And, among
other people, they met with the station manager, who is a Special
Deputy U.S. Marshal. So he is responsive to us when we have
questions. He does not work for us. His responsibility in inves-
tigating crimes is to coordinate with the Marshals Office and the
U.S. Attorney’s Office in Hawaii.
Mr. BAIRD. One last quick question, does—is there a U.S. Mar-
shal in the area all the time in Antarctica or——
Ms. LERNER. The only person with a connection to the Marshals
Service on a regular basis is the deputy—is the station manager.
There are no other U.S. Marshals folks on a regular basis in Ant-
arctica.
Mr. BAIRD. Thank you all very much. My time is up, and I yield
back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congressman Baird.
We will go next to the gentlewoman from Michigan. Ms. Stevens,
you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. STEVENS. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Sexual harassment and assault creates a hostile environment for
women in science and affects their ability to achieve their full po-
tential. Ms. Lerner, this Committee held a hearing in December of
last year about sexual harassment and assault in the United States
Antarctic Program (USAP). An NSF-commissioned report described
harrowing stories about what scientists and contractors have en-
dured and the failure of the agency and of Leidos, the prime con-
tractor to hold perpetrators accountable.
I’m glad to see the OIG is engaged. Last month, your office re-
leased a white paper describing the law enforcement-related dif-
ficulties in Antarctica. Can you briefly summarize why Antarctica
126
poses unique challenges when dealing with crimes committed to
the continent?
Ms. LERNER. Absolutely. I mean, let’s start with just its general
isolation. It’s more like being on the Moon than being anywhere
else on the planet. And it’s about as challenging to get there, al-
though not as expensive. Not as expensive, I’ll give you that. Be-
yond that, the mass of people with folks down there complicates
who’s in charge when it’s a noncriminal matter. From a criminal
perspective, having a deputy—a station manager who’s deputized
as a U.S. Marshal, is, you know, we think, not the most effective
way to provide criminal avenues to victims of crime.
For anything that’s not criminal, the fact that you have some
NSF employees down there, some contractor employees, some sub-
contractor employees, and then scientific researchers from the
United States, and then a whole passel of people that come through
McMurdo in particular from other nations, you know, brings great
complexity——
Ms. STEVENS. Yes.
Ms. LERNER [continuing]. To the process.
Ms. STEVENS. So in NSF’s testimony at the December hearing in-
dicated that the agency is considering significant changes to the
structure of the USAP contract to address the findings of the
SAHPR (‘‘Sexual Assault/Harassment Prevention and Response’’)
report. So how do you think the OIG might be able to play a part
in investigations in a revamped U.S. Antarctic Program? And do
you think the OIG should have a presence on the ice?
Ms. LERNER. We are open to doing that. After reading the
SAHPR report, I sat down with my head of investigations and said
I think we have—we’ve never done this, but we’ve got to look at
this. And we are absolutely open to doing that. In fact, my head
of investigations is down at the Federal Law Enforcement Training
Center right now taking training on investigating sexual assaults.
Ms. STEVENS. Excellent. And so this Committee has and will con-
tinue to engage in active oversight over sexual assault and harass-
ment in the Antarctica, and we’re eager to review future work from
your office. Any preview that you can give us of forthcoming work
that will come from your office on this topic?
Ms. LERNER. Absolutely. We have an inspection that we’re work-
ing on that’ll focus on reporting and investigating sexual assault in
what we’ve learned about that. And I think our next area of focus
is going to be on reporting and investigating sexual harassment.
And we’re also looking at safety and health issues that came to our
attention during our time onsite. So we will have, you know, ongo-
ing work in this area for some time.
Ms. STEVENS. Thank you. And, Mr. O’Donnell, under the prior
Administration, our Federal science agencies faced a crisis of sci-
entific integrity. This was a topic of conversation before we headed
into COVID–19 and certainly after in your office has certainly done
some very significant work in confronting attacks on science, and
you’ve issued reports. This is something that Mr. Tonko and I have
also worked on together. What lessons did you learn from the re-
cent 4-year crisis of scientific integrity? And what steps can you
and other OIGs take to ensure that you are equipped to deal with
similar problems in the future?
127
Mr. O’DONNELL. Of course, this is generalized, but I think some
of the lessons we learned were that it was important to commu-
nicate to EPA staff, EPA scientific staff, that there is a mechanism
for reporting allegations of misconduct, and that by reporting to the
OIG, their confidentiality can be protected. I know that if we go
back to the time period of which you speak, our scientific integrity
office would often express their frustration and the inability to pro-
tect confidentiality. And of course, I’m always reminding them that
we are by law the only entity in the EPA that can protect confiden-
tiality.
Ms. STEVENS. Do you have the resources you need?
Mr. O’DONNELL. As I said, I created an Administrative Investiga-
tions Directorate of about six lawyers and two investigators. Their
docket is so incredibly full right now with complaints that, I prom-
ise you, for every new investigator we could get, we would take on
four more cases.
Ms. STEVENS. It’s the investigation of the investigations.
Mr. O’DONNELL. Yes.
Ms. STEVENS. Thank you all so much for your testimony today
and your time.
With that, Mr. Chair, I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congresswoman Stevens.
We’ll go next to the gentleman from Georgia. Mr. McCormick,
you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. MCCORMICK. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. O’Donnell, in a report in April 13 of this year, the EPA OIG
discussed their concerns on whether foreign gifts could be linked to
federally funded awards as there is no post-grant award reporting
requirements for the EPA research grant recipients to disclose for-
eign support. Thank you for bringing this issue to light. I think it’s
important. Are there any other concerns similar to this that you
could identify today? And have you seen any instances where for-
eign adversaries such as China, Russia, Iran, or anybody else bene-
fited from grant money awarded by the EPA?
Mr. O’DONNELL. So I think I spoke to this earlier. Our Office of
Investigation prioritizes these issues, and we wanted to bring to
light to the EPA the fact that it doesn’t memorialize a requirement
to identify post-award support from foreign actors. And that report
speaks to some of the issues that we had seen where we had seen
support from foreign actors, but I think we were unable to pros-
ecute those cases. And again, those are ones we worked collabo-
ratively. I believe those came from the Department of Education,
working with NSF OIG. And so we will continue to work with the
agency to make sure that they institute that. As far as the tech-
nology loss, we haven’t yet assessed that.
Mr. MCCORMICK. Thank you. Mr. Martin, according to your 2022
annual OIG report, the individual Artemis missions have estimated
$4.1 billion-per-launch costs. According to your reports, this obvi-
ously having an impact on the lifetime—or lifeline for the Artemis
program launches. The question I have for you is what can be done
at NASA or by Congress to improve the efficiency and speed of the
program and how we reduce cost per launch?
Mr. MARTIN. Yes, as I indicated, NASA is focusing on that.
Again, part of what was the sole source contracting nature that
128
underlies the rocket known as the Space Launch System and the
capsule known as Orion, in fact, Congress directed that NASA use
the old contractors that were involved in what was known as the
Constellation program. It was a previous Administration’s return to
the Moon. So that, I think, put NASA behind the 8-ball at the out-
set. And then as I’ve indicated, both contract management and
project management have kind of gone off the rails at different
times, and we’ve seen incredible substantial increases in the cost
and in the schedule to these programs.
NASA compounds those with its use, we find inappropriate at
times, of excess award fees to the contractors even when the pro-
grams are slipping years behind and hundreds of billions of dollars
over cost. So——
Mr. MCCORMICK. So to drill down on that, that’s actually a really
interesting point that I wasn’t aware of. Do you think that that’s
a NASA problem or a congressional oversight problem or a com-
bination thereof?
Mr. MARTIN. I would assume it’s a combination of both.
Mr. MCCORMICK. OK. That’s good to know. What do you think
we can do to improve the condition of the International Space Sta-
tion? And this withdraw of Russia coming out of there in 2024, is
that going to impact that also?
Mr. MARTIN. We’ve done a significant amount of audit review
looking at the future, both the economy in low-Earth orbit that
NASA is trying to promote, low-Earth economy. But it has a de-
cided end of life. Right now, ISS operations have been extended
until 2030 via the CHIPS Act. I think by 2030, you kick the tires,
it’s going to be ready to be deorbited, which is going to be a very
expensive, very complicated activity to do itself, to deorbit that
safely.
Mr. MCCORMICK. Is it a useful facility, though, from 2024 to
2030? If we extend it—and you just mentioned the decommission
without really any discussion of replacement, which has to be the
next piece of that also.
Mr. MARTIN. Right. It’s an absolutely essential part of NASA
space exploration efforts. NASA needs, the country needs a low-
Earth orbit destination to conduct microgravity research, both on
the health of human astronauts but also on technology demonstra-
tion, so it’s critical. And what really concerns us the most, obvi-
ously, the safety of the occupants of the International Space Sta-
tion at the current time, but what we’re concerned about is when
it is decommissioned in 2030 or whenever, that there’s not a gap,
that there is something to follow, that NASA has that ability to
conduct this critical low-Earth orbit research.
Mr. MCCORMICK. And to your knowledge, do we have any plans
to realistically have that replaced on time?
Mr. MARTIN. NASA has a plan. They’re going commercial, which
I think makes a lot of sense, but I am—we—our office is still con-
cerned that there is going to be a gap, which I think is going to
be highly detrimental.
Mr. MCCORMICK. OK. Thank you. I yield.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congressman McCormick.
We’ll go next to the gentleman from Illinois. Mr. Casten, you are
recognized for 5 minutes.
129
Mr. CASTEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thanks to everybody
for taking the time today.
Mr. O’Donnell, I’d like to start with you. A couple of weeks ago,
your office issued a report called—the title was ‘‘The EPA’s Janu-
ary 2021 PFBS toxicity assessment did not uphold the agency’s
commitments to scientific integrity and information quality.’’ I see
you nodding. You’ve read it thoroughly. In that report, it said,
quote, ‘‘During final clearance, a political appointee from the pre-
vious Administration directed that a last-minute review be con-
ducted of the uncertainty factors used to calculate toxicity values,
resulting in scientific disagreement that caused delay, confusion,
and significant changes to the near-final peer-reviewed work prod-
uct.’’ There was a recent Guardian analysis that went on—an in-
vestigative article that went on to say that the EPA career employ-
ees who, during the previous Administration, had meddled in agen-
cy science to weaken toxicity assessments had never been rep-
rimanded, never been fired, and flagged that there was a con-
tinuing problem affecting EPA, specifically an unwillingness to ad-
dress influence—industry influence on career staff.
I want to start just by asking if you agree with or want to add
any color to what the Guardian reported based on your report
about sort of the backward-looking analysis, is this an ongoing
problem?
Mr. O’DONNELL. It is an ongoing problem. As I said, I have stood
up a group devoted to investigating allegations of lost scientific in-
tegrity. It has been one of our top management challenges for the
last 3 years. And that report speaks to the continuing issue. And
I think what for me is most disheartening about that report is that
the agency disagreed with every single one of our recommendations
to try and improve the scientific integrity protections.
Mr. CASTEN. In your view, is there—and maybe this is the an-
swer to that concern. Is there an ongoing problem with industry in-
fluence, and is there something we need to do about that?
Mr. O’DONNELL. Issues of industry influence? Well, that exists
far beyond science. Remember, the EPA does a lot of science. It
does a lot of rulemaking. And for us, this touches on it, not just
on the conflicts of interest with respect to the science, but with re-
spect to the rulemaking, and it’s an issue that does lie for us now,
even now.
Mr. CASTEN. Are there things you’re watching for as a sign of im-
provement or that we can do to help you hold them accountable
and make sure we do hold them accountable for the concerns you
flagged from the past Administration?
Mr. O’DONNELL. My staff meets with the Scientific Integrity Of-
fice regularly. We are trying to improve that relationship. I will
meet with the Deputy Administrator tomorrow to talk about this
specific issue. And it’s my hope, and I believe their commitment to
improve things, but I’m happy to keep you posted——
Mr. CASTEN. OK.
Mr. O’DONNELL [continuing]. On how things are going for us.
Mr. CASTEN. OK. Thank you. Moving to Inspector General Don-
aldson, the DOE’s Environmental Management (EM) Program, as
you know, is responsible for all things nuclear waste, cleaning up
contaminated sites, safe storage. No need to go on. You understand
130
all those issues. The GAO (Government Accountability Office) has
fairly consistently had that DOE Environmental Management Pro-
gram, which I think has about a $7.9 billion budget, on their high-
risk list for some time. I wonder just in the—first question is just
do you agree with GAO’s assessment that the DOE’s Environ-
mental Management Program needs improvement?
Ms. DONALDSON. I do.
Mr. CASTEN. In 2020, there was a GAO report that said that 45
of their recommendations related to the high risk area remained
open, including recommendations pertaining to things like ensuring
that costs and schedule estimates met best practices, incorporating
project management best practices. That was 2020. Has there been
any improvement in your view since that time?
Ms. DONALDSON. I’m not sure I could comment on that com-
fortably without actually going back and looking at those specific
recommendations and then getting an update from the Depart-
ment.
Mr. CASTEN. OK.
Ms. DONALDSON. Nothing immediately comes to mind as an in-
formed response.
Mr. CASTEN. OK. Well, in that case, then would you like to add
any color to your initial response? I do. I recognize this is not a
wedding. But——
Ms. DONALDSON. Right.
Mr. CASTEN [continuing]. I need more color.
Ms. DONALDSON. So we work very—we’ve worked very closely
with the General Accounting Office, so we review all—we deconflict
our work. We talk to them about what they’re doing. They’ve done
a lot of work in this space, and they have had the EM program on
that list for a very long time. And it’s due in part to that being the
largest environmental liability known to man at this point in time,
possibly even planet Earth-wise, so it’s a tremendous amount of
money. And it’s managed in little snapshots called annual appro-
priations, which make it very hard to conduct efficient cleanups.
And then across that complex, you also have consent agreements
that are complicated, involve multiple parties, and so in order to
improve your plan at a particular site, you have to go back in front
of a district court judge and modify your consent agreement. So
there’s a lot of baked-in risk and turmoil managing this huge envi-
ronmental portfolio.
Mr. CASTEN. And I don’t know if you meant it this way. Are you
suggesting that if we maybe did more than just 1 year appropria-
tions, some of these problems would go away?
Ms. DONALDSON. That observation has been made by many folks,
and there’s a lot of common sense to that.
Mr. CASTEN. I’ve heard that in a few other of our programs as
well every once in a while. Well, if there’s anything—in my next
election, I’m going to run for king, and I’ll fix that. Barring
that——
Ms. DONALDSON. Great, good.
Mr. CASTEN. Barring that, anything we can do to help, please let
us know, and thank you all for your service.
Ms. DONALDSON. Appreciate that.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congressman Casten.
131
We will go next to the gentleman from Georgia. Mr. Collins,
you’re recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. COLLINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Inspector General Soskin, I think it’s safe to say that the Depart-
ment of Transportation is currently a mess because Pete Buttigieg
is focused on his left-wing social agenda more than building and
maintaining our Nation’s critical infrastructure. There’s a case in
point. While Ohioans in East Palestine were fleeing their homes
and worried about their health, Buttigieg refused to visit, but he
found time to go on TV and say that there are too many White peo-
ple working in the construction business. And a few days ago, he
basically said that the roads and car accidents are racist. In your
work reviewing the Department’s decisionmaking about grants and
procurement, has the Secretary’s radicalism on social issues af-
fected how the Department is making decisions?
Mr. SOSKIN. Our views of the Department’s grantmaking and
procurement have focused on a number of challenges that the De-
partment faces, and many of those relate to DOT’s efforts to admin-
ister the large volumes of pandemic oversight or pandemic-related
and Infrastructure Act funds. GAO has done some reporting on the
decisionmaking in discretionary grant programs, following up on
work that we have done over time. Ultimately, the Department’s
success and failure in these programs is the responsibility of de-
partment leadership, and we’re optimistic that if our recommenda-
tions are embraced, these funds will be administered to the benefit
of the Nation’s transportation system.
Mr. COLLINS. Right. But I think making a decision on how you
appropriate those funds out, it should be based on the ability to do
the work and not based on a social agenda. So that’s what I was
wondering, if you were looking into that side of it.
Mr. SOSKIN. We don’t have any current work looking at the deci-
sionmaking criteria in the discretionary grant programs.
Mr. COLLINS. I’d like to switch gears just a little bit then. I seem
to remember a previous Cabinet Secretary during a previous Ad-
ministration being forced to resign for taking private jets, just like
Secretary Buttigieg is doing. Are you currently looking into
Buttigieg’s travel choices? And if so, is there any indication of any
waste or abuse? Do you see a double standard with how Secretary
Price was treated versus Buttigieg?
Mr. SOSKIN. Earlier this year, we announced an audit of the Of-
fice of the Secretary of Transportation’s compliance with regula-
tions and policies for executive travel on FAA’s 40 aircraft, which
are used for multiple purposes, including the Secretary’s travel. At
this time, that work is ongoing, and it’s too soon to share any find-
ings.
Mr. COLLINS. Do you have a estimation when you’ll have that
available?
Mr. SOSKIN. At this point, I don’t have an estimate for you.
Mr. COLLINS. How long does it normally take to do something
like that?
Mr. SOSKIN. We set as our goal for timely audit completion an
11-month time period. Frankly, we haven’t been successful in al-
ways meeting that timetable. But one of our priorities and a pri-
132
ority of our new principal in overseeing our audits is to make
progress on the timeliness of our audits.
Mr. COLLINS. All right. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
That’s all I got.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. All right. Thank you very much, Congressman
Collins.
We are awaiting questions from one final Member, so out of a
courtesy, we will give him a couple more minutes to get here. And
rather than sitting here in silence, I will exercise the Chair’s pre-
rogative and ask an additional question of Mr. Martin. Chairman
Lucas——
Mr. MARTIN. Or we could wait.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. That was a nice try.
Chairman Lucas and I sent a letter to NASA a few weeks ago
expressing some concerns about the remote work policies at that
agency. Specifically, we had been alarmed to discover that, in the
first several months of this year, over 50 percent of NASA employ-
ees were apparently working remotely instead of working onsite.
And to be clear, I’m not an opponent of remote work, and I know
the Chairman is not either. However, it’s undeniably true that
there are many circumstances at NASA that either require or cer-
tainly would be much more productively accomplished by people
that are there at the job. I understand that the agency responded
to our inquiry this morning. And although we are still digesting
that, it seems like they are verifying that the salient points that
we raised in our letter are true.
I’m wondering, have you conducted any investigations related to
remote work policies at NASA? And are you concerned, as we are,
about the potential for reduced productivity as a result of those
policies?
Mr. MARTIN. Sure. So no, we have not conducted any investiga-
tions regarding overall agency remote work policies. I will say that
being part of the NASA conversation during COVID, NASA was
coming out of COVID and was leaning pretty significantly into
workplace flexibilities. Back then and now, they were pushing this
down to the center-based decision or project-based decisions about
what the proper cadence of onsite versus telework was. I think it
needs—personally, and what we’re trying to do at the OIG our-
selves, is mission focus. There are certain occupations, certain
roles, and certain times during certain projects where onsite work
is absolutely critical and essential. We have a computer crimes lab-
oratory that’s staffed in person every day because of the equipment
and because of the sensitivity of the information. That has to be
onsite work. And certainly, if you’re involved in a NASA flight
project where you’re bending metal in a cleanroom, you need to be
onsite.
So I do have concerns. We’re going to incorporate these types of
questions and these types of issues into our ongoing audits that we
do across the agency.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. All right. I appreciate that. We’re going to con-
tinue our oversight as well. And again, this isn’t out of any sense
that we are anti-remote work. But certainly, there are disciplines
that we have identified in our research, including, for example,
space hardware mechanics where it’s hard to understand how re-
133
mote work could be done effectively. So I appreciate you continuing
to work with us on that.
And we’re going to buy another minute or two here. Ms. Donald-
son, I was really, really interested in the part of your testimony
where you talked about the incredible increase in the research
budget at DOE that’s been placed on your agency by recent Federal
legislation. In a way, it’s an embarrassment of riches, right, be-
cause it’s great that we’ve got these resources to do this research
that we’ve long wanted to do, but I was not maybe sufficiently
aware at how under-resourced the—your office was to deal with
this influx of, you know, what is obviously an increased need for
oversight. Can you go into a little bit of detail about what kind of
resources you need and would think appropriate to be able to con-
duct the oversight that you think is necessary. Microphone, please,
if you would.
Ms. DONALDSON. I can. So I can tell you how I approached it to
determine, you know, what amount of resources would be sort of
a first installment. So I looked first at how other Inspectors Gen-
eral were funded, just the CFO Act agencies. Independent of the
new legislation, I found myself at the bottom or arguably second
to the bottom on that list for historic underfunding. Then I looked
at the new funding streams and I looked again to how other In-
spectors General impacted by those funding streams had the—how
they had fared. And again, my shop had fared at that point com-
pletely at the bottom of that list. So we did some additional
benchmarking and discovered that .35 percent puts you sort of in
the middle of the pack for Inspectors General, middle to low
end——
Mr. OBERNOLTE. So, I’m sorry, .35 percent of——
Ms. DONALDSON. Of the agency’s——
Mr. OBERNOLTE [continuing]. Grant funding——
Ms. DONALDSON. Correct.
Mr. OBERNOLTE [continuing]. Awarded to an agency being——
Ms. DONALDSON. That’s right.
Mr. OBERNOLTE [continuing]. Steered to the OIG?
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, that’s right.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. OK.
Ms. DONALDSON. So there’s a—it’s a good way to do it because,
if you think about it, it allows you to do those audits, inspections,
and investigations so you’re growing with the portfolio of the agen-
cy. So I think that’s a common metric that IGs look at, you know,
more money going out. And then I looked at all the risk factors at
the Department of Energy, and there are a lot of risk factors, so
much of the funding going to the States, those kinds of things. But
I still kept that number pretty modest at the .35. And then in the
materials I always caution that that does not include a huge num-
ber for the loan portfolio. So it’s my intention——
Mr. OBERNOLTE. I’m sorry, the what portfolio?
Ms. DONALDSON. The loan portfolio——
Mr. OBERNOLTE. OK.
Ms. DONALDSON [continuing]. Which is about half of the money
going to the Department of Energy, so we’ll be coming back for a
second installment. So as it is now, we’re about $180 million short
in our base budget and over $300 million short in connection with
134
IIJA, CHIPS Act, IRA, and the legislation for Puerto Rico, big num-
bers.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Sure. Well, you know, a couple things I think
become clear to me as a result of this discussion. You know, No.
1, perhaps there’s an additional metric we ought to be looking at
to figure out whether or not our Inspectors General are adequately
funded based on the amount of activity that they have to oversee.
And also, I think that we here in Congress need to be more mindful
when we are awarding grant funding of making sure that we si-
multaneously award your offices the relatively modest in compari-
son amount of money that you need to conduct oversight of that
funding.
But, I mean, let me ask you this just playing devil’s advocate. I
think it would be very difficult in your position when Congress
really radically varies the amount of grant funding available to
your agency from year to year. How would you staff up and down
your agency in response to that? I think that would be very dif-
ficult to manage.
Ms. DONALDSON. It presents some challenges, but it is doable. So
the Department of Energy is now quadrupling in size and faced
with that exact same challenge. So one of the things we would do
similar to what they’re doing is hire more people. But we have an-
other little tool in our tool bag, which is the use of accounting firms
to do some of the audit and inspection work so you can retain those
entities to do focused work on internal controls and other things
and then do some good for the mission, and then just simply let
those contracts expire or don’t utilize those contracts, you know,
later in the process. So we have some built-in flexibilities.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. All right. Well, that’s good to hear. And hope-
fully, we’ll be able to work together to make sure that you don’t
face a similar shortfall in the future.
Ms. DONALDSON. Thank you very much.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. I will yield now to my colleague, the gentleman
from California, Mr. Issa. Sir, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. ISSA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you so much for
your indulgence with the other Committee’s markup.
I’m going to start with a question that you wouldn’t expect prob-
ably. Mr. O’Donnell, would you be aware if anyone at EPA cur-
rently worked for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and was
undercover at your agency?
Mr. O’DONNELL. I think because of things that happened about
a decade ago, there was a time it seemed like we were looking for
nothing else. I would be surprised at this point if there were.
Mr. ISSA. Well, I don’t want you to be surprised. So I would say
that in each of your agencies, knowing—since the agency head
must be informed by statute of anyone who’s embedded, I would
ask each of you to go and find out whether erroneously, as hap-
pened a decade ago, they believed somebody’s with the CIA when
in fact they are not. And I only say that because, fool me once, he
went to jail, but he’s out now, and I would really appreciate that
question not going by the wayside because it’s—as esoteric as it is,
it really happened, as you know.
On another note, Dr. Lerner, the—you’re aware of an NSF award
of about $130,000 in 2022 to the University of Virginia to conduct
135
climate change research with a Beijing-based company in Tsing
Hua University?
Ms. LERNER. That’s not ringing a bell off the top of my head, but
I can certainly learn more and get back to you.
Mr. ISSA. I’d appreciate it since, hopefully, during the 2 years I
left Congress, we stopped providing aid at the Trade Development
Agency to China as a developing nation. And hopefully, we now are
at a position where any funds which are directed toward research
in China would be scrutinized for whether they’re absolutely nec-
essary.
Along that line, are you familiar with programs known as
WiseDex?
Ms. LERNER. I’ve just recently become aware of them.
Mr. ISSA. And you’re aware that its job is funding the fight
against misinformation?
Ms. LERNER. That’s what the articles I read indicated.
Mr. ISSA. And are you currently exploring that?
Ms. LERNER. I am happy that—you know, our office, because of
the focus of our work, we don’t have the scientific expertise to as-
sess scientific determinations NSF makes, but we have a history of
looking at situations like this to see if appropriate processes were
followed in making the award and if any other concerns exist.
Mr. ISSA. So notwithstanding that—figuring out what misin-
formation, disinformation, and mal-information are since those are
revolving terms, as you know, it’s not about the science. The ques-
tion that I would have for the IG is, on what basis did Congress
allow for particularly the second one, which is this program—and
I’ll just read it to you—strategically corrects misinformation de-
scribed by the NSF? Now, as it’s defined or described, that’s in the
eye of the beholder, so the criteria for how they determine misin-
formation would seem to be within the expertise of your agency.
Ms. LERNER. We will certainly look at that situation.
Mr. ISSA. And then one of the questions is for each of the panel-
ists, are you currently involved in an investigation or any inves-
tigations as to whether the agencies you oversee are in fact sup-
pressing speech or in any way interfacing that would cause the pro-
motion of or the reduction of certain information being available to
the public?
Mr. O’DONNELL. As I mentioned earlier, we have an Administra-
tive Investigations Directorate that deals with subjects like this
with censorship and suppression. And while I won’t speak on any
particular investigation, I can assure you their docket is quite full.
Mr. SOSKIN. I’m not aware of any investigation work in this area,
and it doesn’t have an obvious link in my mind to the work of the
Department of Transportation.
Ms. DONALDSON. Yes, we do have a volume of retaliation cases
year in and year out, whistleblower retaliation cases. I don’t have
anything in the portfolio that suggests a link back to, you know,
the most senior leadership.
Mr. ISSA. OK. And, Dr. Lerner, of course, you do have them, and
we’ll be looking at them.
Mr. MARTIN. We don’t have NASA. In fact, we have more
websites at NASA pushing on information than any other govern-
ment agency.
136
Mr. ISSA. OK. And then in closing, hopefully—something I heard
on CNBC not long ago after people became aware that Hunter
Biden’s laptop was real and not misinformation or disinformation,
as it was originally marketed by our government to be, I heard
them say, science is never settled. And hopefully, as your agencies
explore science, they will take the same attitude that you should
never eliminate somebody’s contradictory view on any basis while,
in fact, science is never settled. Thank you.
And thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Mr. OBERNOLTE. Thank you, Congressman Issa.
That concludes our Member questions. I want to thank all of our
panelists for bearing with us and for being so engaged in the dis-
cussion. I think you can judge by the amount of interest that we
had from our Members and the number of quality questions that
we got how interesting a topic we all found this to be, so I thank
you very much. We’ll have to do this again in the future.
The record will remain open for an additional 10 days for com-
ments or written questions from Members. This hearing is ad-
journed.
[Whereupon, at 12:30 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
Appendix
ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS
(137)
138
ANSWERS TO POST-HEARING QUESTIONS
Responses by the Honorable Paul K. Martin
139
140
Responses by the Honorable Allison C. Lerner
141
142
Responses by the Honorable Teri L. Donaldson
143
Responses by the Honorable Eric J. Soskin
Æ
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