[Free Beacon] Federal agencies are not monitoring how taxpayer funds are being spent, or whether research grants are being properly disclosed to the public.A new report released by the Government Accountability Office found the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education are failing to enforce the Stevens Amendment, which requires grant recipients to disclose federal funding when they publicize their projects.
The Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration (ETA) does not know how much taxpayer funding is going towards salaries for groups who receive grants, and the National Institutes of Health says it has difficulty calculating where taxpayer funding is going because research programs can have "multiple funding streams" and research portfolios of academics are "now more complex."
The three agencies accounted for over $500 billion in taxpayer-funded grants in fiscal year 2017. HHS alone handed out $455 billion in grants.
Since 1989 the Stevens Amendment, named after the late senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, has required grant recipients to disclose how much federal funding they received for projects when they publicize their taxpayer-funded work in press releases, statements, and other documents.
In his rationale for the law, Stevens said taxpayers "ought to be informed how much money comes from Federal sources in any program, project, or grant activity."