Yesterday, Shukla and GMU got notice that they have piqued the interest of a congressional committee, and via a written notice are required to preserve documents for an impending Congressional investigation and to provide proof that all employees of IGES/COLA have been notified that they are aware they can’t destroy documents. As we follow the unraveling behind the scenes and new FOIA documentation, rumors of some aberrant behavior in the past have begun to surface from former colleagues that suggest we might be dealing with the same sort of ego induced blindness that led to the downfall of IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri. The combination of information WUWT is being given behind the scenes suggests to me that this episode is going to get far worse for Shukla and GMU before it gets better.
At issue is at least 63.5 million dollars from the National Science Foundation, and where it went, whether it was used for the purpose intended, and who benefited from that money. The problem at hand seems to be that there may have been more than a little “double dipping” going on with that grant money as Steve McIntyre pointed out in Shukla’s Gold:
NSF policies purportedly regulate research compensation for members of university faculties by limiting their compensation in the academic year to their university salary, while permitting them to top up their university salary in summer months, but set their compensation at the monthly rate of their university salary (the “two-ninths rule”, as follows:
611.1 Salaries and Wages
- All Grantees. All remuneration paid currently or accrued by the organization for employees working on the NSF-supported project during the grant period is allowable to the extent that:
- total compensation to individual employees is reasonable for the work performed and conforms to the established policy of the organization consistently applied to both government and non-government activities; and
- the charges for work performed directly under NSF grants and for other work allocable as indirect costs are determined and documented as provided in the applicable Federal cost principles.
- Colleges and Universities. Section J.10 of OMB Circular A-21 establishes criteria for compensation work performed on government projects by faculty members during and outside the academic year.
NSF’s policy is:
- Academic Year Salaries. To be based on the individual faculty member’s regular compensation for the continuous period which, under the policy of the institution concerned, constitutes the basis of his/her salary. Except as provided in GPM 616.2, “Intra-University Consulting,” charges to Federal grants, irrespective of the basis of computation, will not exceed the proportionate share of the base salary for that period.
- Periods Outside the Academic Year. During the summer months or other periods not included in the period for which the base salary is paid, salary is to be paid at a monthly rate not in excess of the base salary divided by the number of months in the period for which the base salary is paid. NSF policy on funding of summer salaries (known as NSF’s two-ninths rule) remains unchanged: proposal budgets submitted should not request, and NSF-approved budgets will not include, funding for an individual investigator which exceeds two-ninths of the academic year salary. This limit includes summer salary received from all NSF-funded grants.
Andrew Dessler, who, like most climate academics, has consistently denied that research funding has any impact on alarmism, summarized the above policy as follows:
Texas A&M pays 10 months of my salary to teach. The other two months of my salary are paid out of grants for doing research, but the University sets the amount I receive during those two months equal to the m$158.06onthly rate that the University pays me the other 10 months. Thus, the vast majority of my salary is completely disconnected with research.
There are many other obligations on recipients of federal research grants, many of which are summarized in the NSF Grants Manual.
George Mason University Policy
Shukla has been on the faculty of George Mason University since 1993 (1984-1992 University of Maryland) and, during that time, has obtained federal grants both in the name of George Mason University and the Institute for Global Environment and Security Inc. discussed below).
George Mason, like most universities, has a policy on conflict of interest, including a detailed policy on conflict of interest in federally funded research. Under such policies, “non-profits” are classified as “business”, a protocol that seems very apt when large salaries are withdrawn by insiders from a closely-held “non-profit”:
“Business” means a corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship, firm, enterprise, franchise, association, trust or foundation, or any other individual or entity carrying on a business or profession, whether or not for profit.
The University conflict of interest policies require comprehensive and formal disclosure of personal and family financial interests to the Office of Sponsored Programs.
This policy applies to any person who is responsible for the design, conduct, or reporting of any research funded by a Federal agency. The responsible parties listed in this policy act as institutional officials for purposes of policy implementation, enforcement, and reporting.
Financial Conflict of interest” (FCOI) means a significant financial interest (SFI) directly and significantly affecting the design, conduct, or reporting of the federally funded research.
“Significant financial interest” means a financial interest consisting of one or more of the following interests of the investigator (and/or those of the investigator’s spouse and dependent children) that reasonably appears to be related to the investigator’s institutional responsibilities:
Investigators who apply for any federally funded research must disclose certain financial interests related to that research. Specifically, each investigator must provide a list of his or her known SFIs (and those of his or her spouse and/or dependent children) related to the investigator’s institutional responsibilities.
As a part of the university’s application for federal funds, each investigator must certify (1) that he or she has no such interests or (2) that he or she has such interests and has disclosed them through the institution’s disclosure process. The Office of Sponsored Programs maintains custody of the investigator’s certification.
So, as you can see, there are strict rules on how that money can be used. McIntyre adds commentary that suggests in addition to nepotism, there’s a quantity friends and family all feeding from these NSF grants:
Shukla Compensation
Despite the various changes in grant structure, one constant (or rather steadily increasing amount) has been the several sources of compensation to Shukla and his wife.
In 2001, the earliest year thus far publicly available, in 2001, in addition to his university salary (not yet available, but presumably about $125,000), Shukla and his wife received a further $214,496 in compensation from IGES (Shukla -$128,796; Anne Shukla – $85,700). Their combined compensation from IGES doubled over the next two years to approximately $400,000 (additional to Shukla’s university salary of say $130,000), for combined compensation of about $530,000 by 2004.
Shukla’s university salary increased dramatically over the decade reaching $250,866 by 2013 and $314,000 by 2014. (In this latter year, Shukla was paid much more than Ed Wegman, a George Mason professor of similar seniority). Meanwhile, despite the apparent transition of IGES to George Mason, the income of the Shuklas from IGES continued to increase, reaching $547,000 by 2013. Combined with Shukla’s university salary, the total compensation of Shukla and his wife exceeded $800,000 in both 2013 and 2014. In addition, as noted above, Shukla’s daughter continued to be employed by IGES in 2014; IGES also distributed $100,000 from its climate grant revenue to support an educational charity in India which Shukla had founded.
Discussion
There is a surprising link between the George Mason department and one of my earliest adversaries at NSF, David Verardo, Mann’s handler at NSF, who told him in 2003 that he didn’t have to provide data to me – that Mann was entitled to his view of climate and I was entitled to mine. Verardo’s wife, Stacey Verardo, is a colleague of Shukla, Kinter, Klinger and the others in the AOES department at George Mason, while Verardo himself is a member of the Adjunct Faculty at George Mason.
The most important point about all this?
There’s apparently an $800,000 annual salary and an organization full of Shukla family members that has produced next to no results for the millions received. Even NSF on their own web page acknowledges that only one paper has been produced out of a 4.2 million dollar grant.
Just think of what climate skeptics could do with money like that if we actually got it rather than the purported proverbial “big oil check” we are so often accused of getting?
In addition to the Federal law related to NSF grants, the other real teeth of the matter here is the law governing state employees: state employees may not be compensated by another employer for work that falls under their state employee remit. In this case that would include scientific research by a Professor (a state employee) i.e. Shukla himself.
It seems this went overlooked by GMU for awhile, but there are indications that somebody might have seen the looming problem that threatened to derail the gravy train, and made some changes.
From what can be ascertained at this point, prior to 2013, all the NSF grants flowed through Shukla’s IGES organization to the subsidiary organization COLA. Now, the NSF grants apparently bypass IGES and go directly to GMU and COLA.
WUWT commenter “lokenbr” noted yesterday:
It’s almost as if someone recognized the inappropriate nature of the previous arrangement and shut it down.
Though given the Schedule A filed in May 2015 along with a statement of financial interests by COLA director James Kinter it seems like they are still one and the same entity:
Source: Kinter, James – SOEI – 2015 (PDF)
Former Virginia State Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels quipped on WUWT yesterday: (bold mine)
It would appear that there’s about $31.5 million in overhead (1/2 of 63 million) that should have gone to GMU, but the grants were run through the consulting company, in clear violation of the rules for state employees. This is money that the taxpayers of Virginia had to pony up instead.
IGES’ Form 990 shows Shukla worked 28 hours per week for it. That can only happen if the Dean approves an overage beyond the eight hours allowed.
GMU’s faculty Dean had to know about the magnitude of the money flowing through IGES and into the Shukla family.
GMU’s Provost had to know this, because no Dean would permit that all that overhead to not go to the university on his or her own.
Perhaps the President knew.
NSF had to know this.
NOAA had to know this.
NASA had to know this.
Apparently each one of these entities felt they were above the law. You may be looking at the largest science scandal in US history.
Note: initial publication of this post was missing an image and quote from Pat Michaels due to operator error of the Publish/Save button. The missing elements were added within a couple of minutes. Some spelling and formatting corrections and a link to Kinter’s SOEI have also been added.
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Some enterprising soul should report this to the Inspector General for the NSF. Here is the IG’s website: http://www.nsf.gov/oig/
does any one know the situation of Dr Murry Salby, who was accused of mishandling NSF grant at U Co? We should make serious noise if these two situationjs are treated differently
Indeed we should.
Murry Salby was the subject of a long investigation by the US National Science Foundation.
The investigation, which was finished in February 2009, concluded that over a period when Dr Salby was working at the University of Colorado, he had likely fabricated time sheets in relation to research paid for through NSF money. The NSF OIG concluded that:
“the Subject (Dr Salby) has engaged in a long-running course of deceptive conduct involving both his University and NSF. His conduct reflects a consistent willingness to violate rules and regulations, whether federal or local, for his personal benefit. This supports a finding that the Subject is not presently responsible, and we recommend that he be debarred for five years.”
The NSF subsequently decided to only “debar” Dr Salby for three years, preventing him from accessing any NSF research grants or being involved in work related to them.
I would expect that the NSF OIG and other relevant organizations would carry out similar investigations into Shukla’s activities.
And what the NSF claimed about Salby eventually fell over. More interesting is why they went after him.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/murry-salby-responds-to-the-attacks-on-his-record/
No it didn’t, Salby denied it, surprise. I take it you will adopt the same approach should Shukla be investigated and deny it you will accept his version? After all Joe was asking that they both be treated the same.
Of course the Emperor has clothes.
As I have come to observe repeatedly; “CAGW, created ,orchestrated and protected from investigation, by our bureaucrats.
This policy based evidence manufacturing could not have happened without the connivance of our “civil servants”.
Thank Maurice Strong for being their frontman but this new manifestation of the Emperors New Clothes, required committees and the wisdom of “committee think” to have ever emerged as a tax syphoning meme, let alone a fear based government policy that has lasted over 30 years.
The blessing of the bureaus be upon you.
Or as Kipling put it, The Lords of the Copybook….
“… we might be dealing with the same sort of ego induced blindness that led to the downfall of IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri. ”
Maybe I’m wrong, but this raises suspicion that Shukla is Pachauri’s strawman and possibly brib… eh… paid by him?
Lewandowsky…
It seems to me that cross-discipline efforts are ripe for abuse. As an example, consider a [sic] psychologist entering into the climate science sphere by way of polling skeptics as the phrenologist Lewandowsky keeps trying to do.
I would postulate that he is mining funds from astrology/psychology sources and UN sanctioned sources, private Soroses 🙂 and Obama government sources. I would further postulate that his various applications look very similar. I wonder if he is also double dipping?
Anyone FOI this “scientist”?
Or any other of the wacko cross-discipline fund scavengers?
The House can investigate all it wants. The Senate can investigate this scandal until their blue in the face. Official reports can be published and recommendations can be made. Congress, however, cannot prosecute. For Shukla it is race against time. If the GOP wins in 2016, will a Republican DOJ spend time and resources indicting and prosecuting him? I doubt it.
This episode might be embarrassing. But, that humiliation will be limited to the blogesphere and Drudge. The MSM will ignore it. And Republicans feed at the Beltway trough as deeply as anyone. No one inside the Beltway wants to see a nickle of taxpayer money being lost because of a scandal involving a rather unknown and unstable professor.
“Congress, however, cannot prosecute.”
But it can send a recommendation for prosecution to the AG. If he doesn’t act on it, then that’s something he and his party will have to answer for, or at least be on the defensive about.
The only way they can “answer” for it, is if the public punishes the party at the next election.
Why would the public punish them for not prosecuting a case the public has never heard of?
Shukla may well be the sewage here, but far worse is the sewer, the NSF
You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to even consider pulling this kind of crap.
From President Eisenhower’s farewell address:
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in the newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research – these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well in the face of threat and stress.
But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise.
Of these, I mention two only. (The military/industrial complex is the first of the two, the second is….)
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
___________________________________________________________________________
I would posit the opposite danger is in play as well, that public policy and the scientific technological-elite are walking hand in hand for their mutual goals….
A Two Party Evil Money Cult in Washington D.C. fraud funding their re-election with our tax money.
The Two Party Evil Money Cult in Washington D.C. self funding by fraud its own re-election with our tax money.
Finding out how stuff works has always been my passion. Sixty years ago, as a youth, like many other scientists, I thought I could most usefully pursue this passion by studying physics. And indeed, a physics degree served me well over the course of a long career, during which from time to time I learned lots more about how stuff works. Some, but not so much, about how people work.
But there was a special time five years ago when I learned a lot about how stuff doesn’t work. Following the “Climategate” revelations of skullduggery in the handling, presentation and obscuration of climate science data, there were about five formal inquiries (in the U.S. and U.K.), supposedly looking into the propriety of what had been revealed by Climategate emails.
The ways in which the “investigators” were selected, and their “results” prearranged, astonished me. From these farcical investigations I learned a lot more about how stuff works. I realized I needed to learn a lot more about how people, universities and bureaucracies can smoothly slide through a krypto-legal proceeding, with not one of the apparent wrongdoers needing ever to don a striped suit.
Like others on WUWT, I am expecting some investigations of the “RICO20” signers. I am afraid I may find myself dumbfounded by the course of such investigations. Maybe I’ll learn more about how stuff works. Or doesn’t.
If only the witnesses you want are called then you get the results you want. Done all the time.
NSF, NASA, NOAA. Here is the real problem. If government is dolling out cash like it’s gone out of style, you can’t fail to get schemers who circumvent rules to get as much of the cash as possible. That such a naive scheme as this survived for 20 years or so, means it was the product of winks and nods from the grantors. It is an unbelievable culture, revealed by climategate and the general demeanor and hubris of the annointed in climate science. The recent manual correction of the pesky pause is also a reflection of it.
By all means ask the hard questions (with self evident answers) of Shukla. But don’t forget to ask the even harder questions of NSF, NASA and NOAA. What is in it for them? Or are they rewarding friends with the knowing sanction of those in higher government. Sixty-three million bucks seems to me, perhaps 60 million too high. These people aren’t building anything like Lockheed or General Dynamics are in their contracts. I would like to see the breakdown of salaries and expenses that were submitted for this work, the output of which is just words!!! Did they have to build a satellite? Collect samples in the Mariana Trench? Drill 50 holes through the ice at the South Pole? 63million should be enough for this kind of work for the entire academia in such an essay-type science. They even try to avoid going out and collecting empirical information. M.Mann said to update the tree ring data was a huge and time consuming task and so it hasn’t been done (what else have they got to do?)
Given their animosity toward skeptics, that’s probably something we should be thankful for…
Research funds are actually harder to get these days than formerly, at least in the areas where I have worked. In my labs about 75% of the funding went on salaries, this is how it works: about 30% benefits + 50% overheads on that which means about double the salary. To hire a staff member at $50k you have to raise $100k so as you can see a million dollars doesn’t go very far. As I’ve said before the cases I’m aware of involved faculty who had their own companies outside the university and therefore didn’t have the same degree of oversight that exists within the university system.
You wish! It is usual business for the NSF and, actually, most of the Program Managers there are the Universities faculty. Now, convince me that this is not biased system!
Which advocacy group is pulling the strings at NSF for this kind of grant award?
How about these?
http://www.cfact.org/2015/08/31/governors-billionaires-secretly-promote-obamas-crippling-energy-agenda/
Of course these people knew what they were signing. Any sentient life form could see that it’s a bald faced attempt to prosecute, or cow into silence, those who disagree with them on matters of a few tenths of a degree. After all, if you’re a Lead Author for the IPCC with unfettered powers of censorship and information manipulation, you’ll quickly develop the pig-faced arrogance to think you can be the Minister of Truth.
I know and have worked with some of these people, and it is sad to see what they have made themselves. Perhaps Mann (not Mikey) could update his novel about these folks…
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34440.Doctor_Faustus
This mess has been fermenting for a long time in science in general. Read Daniel Greenberg’s award-winning Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (2001), at:
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Money-Politics-Political-Triumph/dp/0226306356/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1443816911&sr=8-2&keywords=science%2C+money%2C+and+politics
Here’s the silver lining. All this easy money has perverted climate science into catastrophism, and they are simply wrong. The dark cloud is the catastrophic, colossal, towering cumulus, of wasted money.
================
No, it hasn’t perverted it that way, politics is warfare by another name. Money is politics. Those dedicated to their ideology always gravitate towards politics, the more aggressively they pursue their ideological agenda, the more duplicitous the means they employee to achieve those ideological ends.
Those who pursue Marxist ideological agenda’s accept and adhere to only one moral or ethical standard. The End Justifies the Means. Science has been an easy mark for Marxist ideologues since the the creation of Marxism, since Marxism pretends to be a scientific conceptualization of politics. Marxism baths its followers in the arrogant narcissistic and pseudo belief of their own intellectual superiority.
It is a opiate for those who prize their own intellectual aggrandizement, as irresistible as heroin to an addict. For those within the scientific community the accolades of peer acceptance is a temptation akin to addiction, worthy of almost any transgression.
In our modern society the risks taken by Galileo Galilei against his reputation and fortunes are inconceivable, all that matters is the social statues and wealth that the accolades of peer acceptance promise.
There was never any possibility that the Global Warming/Climate Change Ponzi Scheme would survive a Forensic Auditing. The whole thing is and always was a Marxist scheme to defraud Western Nations that had not yet succumbed to Marxism/Socialism/Communism. Just as Greenpeace was infiltrated and taken over by Marxists using environmentalism as a mask to hide their true Marxist agenda behind. So likewise the United Marxist Nations willfully, intentionally and knowingly inflicted this fraud on the Western Nations of the world.
Marxism is the most evil, vile and ruthless political ideology ever conceived of by men, the only thing more evil, is those who cling to it and subscribe to its moral and ethical code that “The End Justifies the Means” which in reality means, that no lie or atrocity is too vile or evil to be employed in gaining their objectives. This Global Warming/Climate Change scheme is just one of their many attempts to create/foist upon the world their perverted and evil concept of Utopia.
Those who do not understand this, or who live in denial, refusing to understand this, don’t have the intellectual don’t have the honestly or brain power to light a 1 milliwatt LED.
doriangrey1
Not sure about the claim “is and always was…Marxist”. Doesn’t mean it hasn’t evolved into that, but unclear how you determined it started out that way.
There is nothing secret about this, it has been exposed many times, though, the memory hole keep trying to swallow it.
IPCC Official: “Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World’s Wealth”
The quote here by Ottmar Edenhofer seems to suggest that Marxists infiltrated and took over the Climate Change movement, but that simple is not the case. From the very beginning with Rajendra Pachauri the Marxists were always the driving force behind Anthropocentric Global Warming/Climate Change. It has always been about collapsing Western constitutional representative governments in order to replace them with Marxist Governments.
Searching Google News for shukla turns up a lot of unrelated stuff but searching for shukla climate shows articles by Daily Caller, Breitbart News and National Review Online.
And the most important question here…….
If the grant allocation system is this lax, and able to be manipulated quite so easily — how many other Shuklas are there out there? How many other climate grants are being skimmed? How much government money is simply falling into the vast black hole of Climate Corruption?
We had Global Warming, then Climate Change, then Climate Disruption, and now Climate Corruption. What next? Climate Meltdown?
R
ralfellis
Plainly this means the NSF et al need significant funding increases to strengthen their compliance functions. A few billion dollars should get us started. Don’t expect results right away.
“Perhaps the President knew…”
The State Department should’ve known.
Reed Schuler, Climate Change Treaty Negotiator for the State Department, is listed as a participant at the Shukla Symposium.
The George Mason University may get into a lot of trouble as well.
An NSF grant is typically divided in 3, with 2/3 going to the recipient, and 1/3 given to the school PRECISELY FOR THE JOB of making sure that the grant is used properly. There is no such overhead on big instrumentation money, which goes 100% to the grantee.
That is, congress through the NSF decided not to police grant use (an immense enterprise on a national scale), but instead pay the universities a hefty chunk to police it.
From time to time, more than a decade apart, the NSF does a full audit of one institution, akin to the IRS compliance check. I remember that Duke was subject to such a probe in math, about 15 years ago, with the use of every dollar checked. After that (which did not come out that well) the NSF changed a lot of policies.
Needless to say, in the case at hand the university did not really earn its millions.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
Shukla’s own goal demonstrates that ‘sceptics’ to him, pose a greater threat than any ridicule he can inflict upon himself. Ouch.