Government watchdog's fake company was able to gather enough material to make a dirty bomb

All it takes to obtain enough radioactive material to build a dirty bomb is a fake company and forged licenses, according to a new government watchdog report.

The report by the Government Accountability Office, exclusively obtained by NBC News, details how easily a bad actor could get their hands on the kind of materials that could then be used to cause “hundreds of deaths from evacuations and billions of dollars of socioeconomic effects.”

The GAO, a nonpartisan congressional auditing agency, called on the agency responsible for controlling the distribution of radioactive material, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), to implement more stringent screening methods immediately.

“We already knew that the threat of a dirty bomb attack in the United States is real,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, which commissioned the report.