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NASA Spinoff: Data Storage Devices That Play Music

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 9, 2008

Opinion L.A., LA Times

“And the iPods, all $800 bucks’ worth, were purchased by a NASA supervisor who — and I stress, this is true — had his name engraved on each of them. Obviously there are more egregious cases in the GAO study, but these are the most fun ones.”

Governmentwide Purchase Cards: Actions Needed to Strengthen Internal Controls to Reduce Fraudulent, Improper, and Abusive Purchases. GAO-08-333, March 14.

Page 8: “At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a cardholder used the government purchase card to acquire two 60GB iPods. Although NASA officials maintained that the iPods were essential for official data storage, we found that the cardholder personalized the iPods with the requester’s and agency’s names and used the iPods to store songs and music videos. Although the iPods had some business files on them, we concluded that the purchase was abusive because other data storage devices without video and audio capabilities were available at lower costs.”

Reader note: I am a NASA civil servant at the Marshall Space Flight Center with a current government travel card and previous holder of a government purchase card. I don’t know if our purchase restrictions are at the Center or Agency level (your story would suggest Center level) but at Marshall, they put in strict controls over what can be purchased, to the point of legitimate meal purchases (bag of chips at a gas station) being denied. …

… I will make no excuses for any civil servant who fraudulently uses a government charge card. However, this is a problem that Congress could easily solve: impose the restrictions that NASA Marshall has implemented. While the civil servants who misuse the system should to jail, Congress has no one to blame but themselves for not imposing these restrictions in the first place. If NASA can do it, then so can other government agencies and Congress should force them to do so. As a taxpayer, I am deeply offended that people get away with this.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.