US

Feds Hide Why Shrimp On A Treadmill Cost $1.3M

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Ethan Barton Editor in Chief
Font Size:

Including $1.3 million for shrimp-on-treadmill research, National Science Foundation officials spend billions of unchecked dollars every year with little to no public accountability.

The agency awarded nearly $6.7 billion in research grants in 2015, according to USAspending.gov. Yet, publicly available details are limited without filing a Freedom of Information Act request. Even then, there are no guarantees any additional information will be disclosed.

“Line-by-line budget breakdowns of NSF awards are not public information,” agency spokesman Jessica Arriens told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Those breakdowns often contain proprietary information and other things which we don’t release to the public.”

Arriens refused to explain what “other things” meant.

“The public does have a right to know what defines ‘other’ stuff,” National Freedom of Information Coalition Interim Executive Director Dan Bevarly told TheDCNF. Denying proprietary information, however, is “understandable,” he said.

“People deserve an explanation of what that constitutes,” he continued. “It adds more to the public suspicion. What is it they’re withholding? Unfortunately, they’re not forthcoming, so they allow us to connect the dots together.”

A Freedom of Information Act request could disclose some details, Arriens noted.

“Some of the budget may be releasable information, however, but our General Counsel office would have to review it through a FOIA request to determine exactly what information,” Arriens said. The FOIA requires that all government documents be available on request to any citizen, subject only to exceptions such as privacy, proprietary information and law enforcement.

But House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Chairman [crscore]Lamar Smith[/crscore] – a Republican from Texas who is fighting what he calls “secret science” at the Environmental Protection Agency – told TheDCNF that:

“If there is proprietary information in a project file, then NSF can rightfully redact that information. But NSF can’t use the proprietary information shield to lock up its files and block taxpayers from knowing how their money is being spent. The science committee will closely monitor this issue to ensure taxpayer-funded science is open and transparent.”

Smith’s committee isn’t the only congressional panel taking an interest in secret science in federal agencies. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a Jan. 11, 2016, report that described the FOIA process as “broken” and claimed the Obama administration “encourages an unlawful presumption in favor of secrecy.”

The watchdog Citizens Against Government Waste’s Government Affairs Director Bill Christian has waited for a FOIA response from NSF for nearly two years.

“We did a FOIA request in February of 2014 and shortly thereafter we got the pretty standard response that our request would take longer than the statutory 20 days,” Christian told TheDCNF. “We’re going on almost two years of what we would have thought would have been a fairly straightforward request.”

Christian requested documents that supported NSF’s decision to fund eight projects. He was told in July 2014 – five months after his request – he could expect responses to one project per week in July 2014, but Christian has only obtained two as of Jan. 15.

It typically takes NSF a month to process a FOIA request, according to Arriens.

The need for more transparency in the agency became clear earlier this month when a former University of California, San Diego researcher pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining millions of dollars in grants, including some from NSF.

Homayoun Karimabadi was paid $1.9 million between 2005 and 2013 by his employer SciberQuest Inc., “due, in part, to the fraudulently obtained grants or contracts,” according to the Department of Justice. He faces up to 20 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.

More infamy may be ahead for NSF because the experiment it funded a few years ago featuring a shrimp on a treadmill is being conducted a second time.

David Scholnick, one of the researchers involved in the running shrimp experiment, told TheDCNF that neither he nor the $47 treadmill were paid for with NSF money. There were actually several related experments, not all of which involved running shrimp, and the grant money was mainly used to pay researcher’s salaries, lead investigator Lou Burnett told TheDCNF.

“The shrimp on a treadmill was just one experiment in a battery of experiments,” Karen Burnett – another lead investigator and Lou’s wife – told TheDCNF.

Lou burnett added that “we ought to be forthcoming, even though the motive of the person requesting [budget information] may be other than something you like.” He said he was surprised NSF didn’t openly share spending details.

The NSF website discloses only that the College of Charleston was awarded nearly $560,000 in 2007 and nearly $762,000 in 2012 for the shrimp research.

Follow Ethan on Twitter

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel