“Spraying Alcoholic Rats With Bobcat Urine” Included In Sen. Rand Paul’s “Festivus Report” detailing $54.7 Billion In Wasteful Spending During 2020

Senator Rand Paul recently released “The Festivus Report,” in which he details how billions of taxpayer dollars were “wasted” in the year 2020. It was one of the most interesting and enlightening reports I’ve ever read. It is very long but incredibly informative. It details so much of what happens behind the scenes in government spending and gives the public a clue as to how our government carefully packages wasteful spending in a way that we won’t recognize it as such. I highly encourage you to at least skim through the report here.

As a forward, Senator Paul writes,

“Congress spent as never before, doing so ostensibly without a care. The Congressional Budget Office says the Fiscal Year 2020 deficit was an eye-watering $3.1 trillion, with a “T.” Some of that is traceable to COVID-related spending, but a lot of it was not. For example, perhaps somebody can explain to me why the Kennedy Center needed $25 million for salaries? Or why Congress reimbursed some agencies for money they had spent in late 2019 and early 2020, before COVID hit, on efforts unrelated to COVID? Maybe, just maybe, cutting agencies blank checks is why the debt skyrocketed from $23 trillion to more than $27 trillion. Spending was about 50% higher than last year, and payments of interest on the public debt remained extremely high at $387 billion. If you laid out that many $1 bills end to end, it’d be enough to wrap around the earth 1,506 times. And that’s money the government spends that doesn’t help anybody — doesn’t even buy a pen or a paper clip.”

“To pay for test tubes for COVID tests that turn out to be soda bottles? To see if hot tubbing a few times a week eases stress? Or is the risk worth it so we can literally lose drones over Afghanistan?!? You’ll find all that, and more, in this year’s edition of my Festivus Report, highlighting $54,746,524,505.37 of totally wasted money.”

The list really does include some very interesting expenditures. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Studied if you’ll eat ground-up bugs
  • (NIH&NIFA)…$1,327,781.72
• Studied why stress makes hair turn grey
  • (NIH)…$36,831,620.00
• Tried to get Eastern Mediterranean youth to stop smoking hookah
  • (NIH)…$1,471,617.00
• Used cancer research money to create a “smart toilet”
  • (NIH)…$6,973,057.00
• Sent messages to moms to stop their teenage girls from indoor tanning
  • (NIH)…$3,452,234.00
• Tested if hot tubbing can lower stress
  • (NIH)…$2,004,704.00
• Tried to help people get over their fears of going to the dentist
  • (NIH)…$1,039,554.00
• Spent millions to help deal with truant Filipino youth
  • (USAID)…$37,500,000.00
• Helped disconnected Tunisian youth not feel like a problem
  • (USAID) …$48,000,000.00
• Walked lizards on a treadmill
  • (NSF)…$1,557,083.00
• Developed a wearable headset to track eating behavior
  • (NSF)…$2,075,074.00
• Repurposed COVID response funds for unrelated acquisitions
  • (DOD)…$1,000,000,000.00
• Rebuilt a taxiway for airplanes on Nantucket Island
  • (FAA)…$19,999,869.00
• Bought COVID test tubes but received unusable soda bottles
  • (FEMA)…$10,502,997.50
• Prepared bugs for you to eat
  • (NSF and DARPA)…$2,819,702.02
• Sprayed alcoholic rats with bobcat urine
  • (NIH and VA)…$4,575,431.00

The Senator clarifies some items in his report, like Fish and Wildlife Services “Funding the Boating Infrastructure Grant Program” to the tune of more than $13.5 million dollars, explaining that this money was spent on programs including “yacht subsidies” and “taxing everyday boaters and fishermen to make it easier to dock your boat outside your mansion, or at the beach.” Or how the U.S. Marshals Service “bought vehicles for State and local law enforcement agencies” for $53,900,000.00, which doesn’t seem entirely like waste until the Senator explains that they have “lost track of a substantial proportion” of the purchased vehicles.

In all, Senator Paul calculated a whopping $54,746,524,505.37 of wasted taxpayer money. $54.7 billion. One can’t help but wonder, when Congress can only seem to find $600 for hard working locked-down Americans, why are millions being spent researching alcoholic rats, hot tubbing, and dentistry fears? While I’m sure the organizations and groups who receive the billions of taxpayer dollars would insist that it wasn’t being wasted (on things like lizards on treadmills), but  I wonder if bankrupt American citizens appreciate their taxes being spent on those lizards and foreign social issues instead of the taxpayers themselves? I suspect the people whose tax dollars make up those millions would rather have it spent to keep small businesses from going bankrupt, improving American social programs, and otherwise improving the lives of American citizens.

Interestingly, quite a few expenditures directly benefited foreign nations on rather interesting social issues like helping teens to feel important, to stop smoking hooka, or to deal with truancy. And as nice as it is to help other countries, this time when our country is deeply in debt and struggling to support its own citizens is not the time to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on other countries. This became a pretty hot topic when people saw how many billions of dollars were allocated to foreign nations in the most recent stimulus bill.

Well, it’s one thing to point out the waste, but it’s another thing entirely to put a stop to it. In his report, Senator Paul details some of the positions and actions he has taken to mitigate the wasteful spending in Congress, most of which has been met with resistance or bizarrely long timelines. Notably, he was one of the very few who voted ‘No’ on the massive stimulus bill, specifically because of the amount of pork in the bill.

6 RepublicanS against voted against the relief bill:

Marsha Blackburn
Rick Scott
Ron Johnson
Mike Lee
Rand Paul
Ted Cruz

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 22, 2020

Andy Biggs and Chip Roy among the 50 House Republicans who voted NO on this mess of a bill. So I’ve got a lot of grievances with the other 145 or so House Republicans. https://t.co/WuU7VCmbwr

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 23, 2020

Here is the speech Senator Rand Paul made on the floor of the Senate, calling out the waste and poor fiscal management in the massive bill.

Remember how I homeschool my kids? Well, my oldest son’s unit in social studies right now is all about the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence. One of the main points that we keep studying is that having a democratic republic means that the government representatives must represent the interests of those by whom they were elected. And if they don’t, the citizens are free to remove and replace them. So my question to you is, are your representatives truly representing your interests and priorities? If not, will you follow the Founding Fathers’ intentions to remove and replace them?