FEDS HAND OUT BILLIONS FOR RESEARCH THAT MAY BE BASED ON PLAGIARISM, FAKE DATA: Now, isn’t that reassuring! Allison Lerner is the inspector general at the National Science Foundation. She and her small team of investigators and auditors have been warning for a long time that hundreds of funding proposals submitted to NSF contain plagiarized passages and/or made-up data. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton was told by a senior NSF official that it’s impossible to know if grant recipients actually spend the funds as promised. Maybe it’s time somebody in Congress or at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue listened to Lerner?