WASHINGTON — A U.S. economic aid program to keep Russian scientists from selling weapons information to terrorists apparently funneled much of the money to scientists who never claimed to have a background in nuclear, chemical or biological programs, a congressional report said Friday.
The auditors also found that in many cases assistance went to scientists who were too young to have participated in the Soviet-era weapons programs.
The report by the Government Accountability Office urged the Energy Department to overhaul the nuclear non-proliferation program and craft a way to end it. Some Russian officials told the auditors the program is no longer needed, given economic improvements in Russia in recent years.
The department's National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the program, said in a letter attached to the GAO report that the agency viewed the program as justified and will continue to support it. .
People are also reading…
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, who released the report, said the administration "should undertake a serious review of the program's non-proliferation benefits" and questioned whether its continued funding made sense.
"GAO has raised troubling questions about whether a nonproliferation program has perversely funded a younger generation of (Russian) weapons scientists," said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Created after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, the program — known as the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, or IPP — was designed to provide economic assistance and find jobs for Russian scientists involved in nuclear, chemical and biological weapons research. With many of these scientists losing their jobs, the concern was they might use their knowledge to sell information — or themselves — to terrorists.
The report said the Energy Department has overstated the success of the program.
The auditors found that of 6,450 scientists in a sample of projects more than half of the scientists paid by the program never claimed to have experience in dealing with weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical, biological — or had the ability to conduct the kind of knowledge transfer the program was aimed at preventing.
