All of which are illegal to charge to the NSF.
Which law would that violate?
I'm not saying it's *not* against the law, it very well may be. That's because Congress has a cost-plus mentality,
In the private sector the question would be what did we get for our money and could we have got it cheaper elsewhere? In the public sector Congress wants to know what you did with "their" money. Hey, you paid for coffee for people who worked overtime or attended a meeting? Well we could have saved money if you made them buy the coffee itself.
But the funny thing is that this penny-pinching doesn't actually save money. I once sat in on a meeting at a state agency that had spent quarter million dollars of federal grant money to build a trivial website. I asked the state IT guy what his group would have charged internally to develop the site. His answer? Twelve thousand. My estimate was fifteen thousand if it were a private sector customer.
It's outrageous to spend a quarter million dollars for something you could get for twelve thousand, but here's the thing: it's not illegal. Not in the least. It should be illegal to hire lobbyists to work on bids for federal contracts, but it's *totally* legal.
Legality means nothing here, ethically speaking, because the laws have been corrupted by politicians, who in turn are corrupted by lobbying and corporate dollars. In fact rules that are supposed to prevent Uncle Sam from getting cheated pretty much just ensure that he gets cheated on a jaw-dropping scale. I've seen it up close, and it's more corrupt than even people who consider themselves cynical about government suppose.