Millions in Earmarks Purchase Little of Use

"It's fair to ask whether this company is serving a legitimate charitable purpose, and whether the taxpayers are getting a fair return on their investment," Grassley said in a statement.

The Post review also found that lawmakers and Pentagon officials continued allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to the center in recent years, despite publicly available reports from auditors and others raising questions about its effectiveness.

Among the problems cited: Managers of the center sometimes duplicated the work of private industry, and the Defense Department was not doing enough to oversee the program or promote its research. A National Research Council committee convened to examine the center's approach to transferring technology said in a 2002 report that "this model has not been successfully demonstrated."

One year later, the Army awarded Concurrent a five-year contract worth up to $350 million to continue running the center.

Concurrent spokeswoman Mary Bevan said she had no comment about the center and referred a reporter to the Army. Bevan defended Concurrent's non-profit status, saying "we perform scientific research and development."

"We don't claim to be a charity," she said. "We're not the United Way."

Documents filed by Concurrent with the Internal Revenue Service show it is registered as a tax-exempt charitable organization.

"Something is very wrong here. Why is the government pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a contractor whose work it isn't using?" said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group in the District that has examined defense spending over the years.

The NDCEE came about as a result of federal environmental legislation in 1990 that mandated wide-ranging pollution prevention efforts by the government.

In response, the Defense Department created pollution prevention programs and pledged to cut hazardous waste by half by the end of the 1990s. The center was to be a key player in those efforts.

With Murtha leading the way, Congress set aside the $5 million to start the center as a subsidiary of the nonprofit organization that would become Concurrent Technologies. The center set out to be "a national resource" for demonstrating and transferring environmental technologies to the Defense Department, other government agencies and industry, company documents show.

The center has no employees of its own, Army officials said. It is run by Concurrent, with oversight provided by at least two Army program officials. It does work with the Army, Air Force, Navy, federal and state agencies, universities and private companies, according to company documents. Booz Allen Hamilton, Parsons and Battelle Memorial Institute are members of its "contracting team," company documents show.