Washington

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is under fire over its financial management of major research projects — including its contribution to the Large Hadron Collider, the particle collider being built at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory in Geneva.

An audit by the research agency's inspector general, Christine Boesz, found that the NSF failed to track properly the full costs of the projects. For example, the agency told the National Science Board, its governing body, that its contribution to detectors at the Large Hadron Collider would cost $81 million. But, the audit says, a further $57 million will be needed for advanced computing and maintenance if US scientists are to glean any data from the detectors.

“The inspector general's report has confirmed my fears that there is little oversight of NSF's large facilities,” says Senator Kit Bond (Republican, Missouri), the senior Republican on the Senate subcommittee that funds the NSF. At a hearing on 15 May, Bond nonetheless expressed his support for a plan that would see the NSF's budget double in size within five years (see Nature 417, 209; 2002).

NSF officials claim that the inspector general's report is misleading. Robert Eisenstein, who heads the NSF's Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, says that the $81 million will be enough to complete the parts of the detectors that are specified by the NSF's agreement with CERN. “We will deliver exactly what we said we will deliver,” he says. The proposed $57 million will cover maintenance and computing technology that had not even been invented when the agreement was signed, says Eisenstein.