NBC Bay Area ^ | 05/15/2012 | By Tony Kovaleski, Liza Meak, and Felipe Escamilla
The NBC Investigative Unit has raised questions about two grants totaling nearly $1.5 million dollars distributed to the University of California San Francisco. The money was part of the federal stimulus program and went to studies into the erectile dysfunction of overweight middle aged men and the accurate reporting of someone's sexual history.
This is part of our ongoing series of investigations by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit into who got federal stimulus dollars, and why some projects did not break ground more than two years after receiving the grant.
The Investigative Unit looked closely at the federal government's decision to spend nearly $1.5 million dollars of taxpayer money, money that came here to California. Grant number 1R01HD056950-01A2 was among the thousands of grants funded, receiving $1.2 million dollars. This grant studied how to improve the accuracy of how people responded to questions about their sexual history.
"If you honestly report on your sexual activity and number of partners?" Scott Amey with asked with a sigh. "That's a good one."
Amey is the general council for POGO, the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington D.C. nonpartisan non-profit government watchdog group. During our interview with an NBC crew he tried to explain why the government used that many tax dollars to improve self reports about high risk sexual behavior.
"I don't think most tax payers would think that would be a justified spending of stimulus money to conduct a sex study over fixing bridges and roads that are crumbling every day," Amey added.
NBC Bay Area talked to the University of California San Francisco, the institution that received the grant. "Does it make you wonder a little bit, stimulus money for a study like this?" Kovaleski asked Jeff Sheehy, who works at the UCSF Aids Research Center.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcbayarea.com ...
