It may come as no surprise to many folks out there that there’s a lot of overlap within the monolithic entity that governs us. But would you have guessed that up to $70 million of your tax dollars were wasted on duplicate funding of U.S.-government-backed research projects over the past ten years?
After going through almost 850,000 grant award documents, researchers at Virginia Tech discovered that there was an overlapping of financing from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation and Energy Department.
Unfortunately, though, the Department of Energy stopped publishing grand award summaries in 2009, so recent grants weren’t even available for this study. It makes you wonder if there’s even more duplicate funding we don’t know about.
Science is getting a bum rap from this kind of stuff. This study, along with green energy financing snafus, are part of a growing list of government financial follies when it comes to backing science-related programs and companies.
The Virginia Tech and Duke Universities study shows this isn’t a new trend — the documents they dissected went as far back as 1985.
So how’d these researchers detect the funding overlap? They used plagiarism detecting technology to find duplicate grants.
As a way to curb this issue, the Government Accountability Office spearheaded an audit last year regarding health funding. The conclusion? That the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense ought to be a bit more proactive in avoiding overlapping funding.
More details on this study can be found in Nature.