FOX "Interview WIth Senator Charles Grassley" - Transcript
Interview
MR. SMITH: But according to a government report, at least one senior official at the National Science Foundation has been spending as much as 20 percent of his working hours researching pornography. Maybe he's not researching it at all but checking it out at the same time. Whatever it is, investigators even calculated the value of the lost time by this one official to be $58,000.
And now the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee wants some answers. Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is requesting documents as to how much time and how much money may have been spent surfing the Web for porn. The reason: because people at the National Science Foundation are paid with taxpayer dollars, and that agency is set to receive about $3 billion in money from President Obama's stimulus bill.
With us now on Capitol Hill: Senator Chuck Grassley. Senator, good to see you.
SEN. GRASSLEY: Chuck, good to be with you.
MR. SMITH: It is a side item, and critics might say, "Aw, this is just to distract us from the bigger picture." But it seems to make the Republican point that there's more than one way to solve these problems, and would you look at some waste for once?
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, this is just one example. When you've got one senior official at the National Science Foundation with -- spending 20 percent of their time over a two-year period of time, costing the taxpayers $58,000, and then on top of that, you know, he spent $40,000 on his own credit card to view the same things and do things similar -- he had online chats of specifically sexually explicit conversations -- you wonder who's watching the shop there. And it's not --
MR. SMITH: You know, you do that in corporate America, Senator -- I know for a fact you do that sort of thing in corporate America and they'll toss you right out on your ear. It's --
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well --
MR. SMITH: It's very much disallowed.
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, this guy's gone now. I don't know whether he quit or was fired.
But you understand, Shep, this is just from one server at NSF. It's -- you know, I don't how much more of it there is. And there's more -- according to the report, there's more than just this one person. I don't know how many others. That's why I'm asking for those documents that you're talking about. And we've also been talking to key members of Congress in charge of this appropriations process, to get them involved, because when you're appropriating $3 billion for an agency that only gets 6 billion (dollars) and that's stimulus, you wonder whether or not they really need the money if they aren't using the $6 billion as effectively as they ought to when it's wasted with a senior official wasting $58,000 of his time for sexually explicit pornography .
MR. SMITH: Senator, it is a minority view, and the vast majority of people will say we have to have this stimulus plan, we have to pump this money in here; our economy is going to fall apart. But there is a minority view that says don't do anything; it all got messed up because everything was fake. We were borrowing money, and none -- so much of the economy wasn't real.
Are you one who would suggest that at this point in time we should just stay the course and not spend these hundreds of billions of dollars?
SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, there's a lot in this package that ought to not be spent. I don't want to put myself quite in the category of not doing anything, because you heard the reports you had on just before me, the news conference on reducing taxes. I do believe in reducing taxes to encourage investment, because when you have private investment, that creates jobs long-term, whereas with appropriating money from the federal Treasury, even for a two-year period of time, it creates jobs short-term, which might be necessary to stimulate the economy, but there's a lot in this bill that is going to go way on beyond two years and become part of the baseline and be an obligation for a long time into the future, maybe ever. And that's the difference between stimulus and using the stimulus as a subterfuge to get other things done that you wouldn't normally get done through the regular order or the regular appropriation process.
MR. SMITH: Senator, we'll be watching the porn controversy along with you. Thank you. Good luck with that.
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