Jodi and I signed up for a weekend NY Times subscription. For years, I’ve heard the lament that my generation doesn’t take the printed word seriously enough. I get this from academics, the media, and my reporter friends. Fine. Now I have a newspaper subscription. Leave me and my generation alone.
This is the first weekend of the subscription, and I’m already learning something that crosses the interesting boundary of science and politics. In this Sunday’s Times, on page 19 (the National section), was a story about Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), contractor kickbacks, and a National Science Foundation grant. It caught my attention right away; although the whole Stevens scandal has been in the news for weeks, I didn’t know about the NSF connection.
According to the story, the VECO contracting company [1] of Alaska is alleged to have paid for construction work on the Stevens’ house in AK. Stevens denies the accusation, saying that he and his wife paid for the remodel. However, their son has been connected to a corruption scandal and the investigation had turned up this possible VECO/Ted Stevens connection. It’s all still being investigated, of course, but one of the contractors on the Stevens remodel has alleged that they were instructed to pass receipts to VECO for approval.
Where does the NSF enter this tale? Well, the Times reports that months before the remodel work VECO received a $70 million contract from the NSF. This establishes a **possible** situation for a kickback, but no connection appears to have actually been established. However, I was personally curious about for what a contractor in AK needed a $70 million NSF contract. Given that NSF is a public institution, I assumed it would be no trouble to find out how the money was spent.
First, I was interested to find out that VECO was just acquired by a global energy company. It sounded like VECO was an energy contractor. A quick web search told me that the contracts were awarded over a period of years between 1999 and 2004, for polar research. VECO’s polar research division has its own website [2]. Various sites appear to alternatively state that VECO had no such division before the grants were awarded, but also that after some Freedom of Information Act requests no evidence of a link between Stevens and the awards has been found.
Let it never be said that politics and science don’t have a connection.
[1] http://www.ch2m.com/corporate/markets/energy/veco.asp
[2] http://vecopolar.com/
