Part honor society and part think tank, the Academy was chartered by Congress in 1863 to serve as an official, albeit nongovernmental, science adviser. Most of the ad,vice comes in the form of studies, on anything a federal agency requests, from the Academy’s National Research Council. That’s where Dingell’s staffers are hunting for creative accounting. In response, NAS speeded up an internal audit, and last week returned to the government $168,723. That includes printing costs for holiday cards, the difference between coach and first-class travel, parking tickets incurred by an NAS van delivering interoffice mail and a $1,400 charge for a boat slip on Cape Cod, where NAS has a conference center (but not a boat).
Compared with the $731,000 MIT returned, the NAS overcharges (which it calls inadvertent) seem like small change, especially since the government gets a bargain when it shops for science at NAS. The Academy charges for staff costs, overhead for things like building maintenance, and travel for panel members. But scientists on the panels, who often command consulting fees of $350 per hour and up, work for free, donating what NAS estimates to be $27 million a year in research hours.
Herbert served on an NRC panel from 1980 to 1985. It was charged with revising the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs). In 1985 NAS rejected its report: NAS reviewers and NAS president Frank Press disagreed with the recommendation that RDAs for vitamins A and C be lowered. Some panel members copyrighted their work (a step apparently unique in the annals of NAS) because they were afraid NAS would suppress or change it forever and wanted to shop it around to publishers. The National Institutes of Health, which had commissioned and paid $582,815 for the RDA report, wasn’t too pleased about not getting it, and demanded that NAS produce a report or return the money. In 1988, NAS delivered the original report almost verbatim.
Herbert sued, charging NAS with “defrauding the government by delivering stolen goods [the copyrighted report] in exchange for government money.” The Academy responds, “If we don’t have [the copyright], we certainly have a share.” Even if the court clears NAS, Dingell’s committee thinks the Academy may have another problem. Its charter prohibits it from turning a profit. But NAS has taken in more than $450,000 from sales of the RDA report, which cost less than $300,000 to print. Other reports do well, too. Dingell is intrigued that the Academy makes money on work the government pays for. And when Dingell is intrigued, science quakes.
