Happy Festivus! It's a time for all families to come together at the aluminum pole, airing their grievances and engaging in feats of strength. It is also that special day of the year when Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) provides taxpayers with the gift of his ninth annual Festivus Report, highlighting all of the government waste produced by Republicans and Democrats in Washington. This year? Barbie dolls, transgender monkeys, and lobsters headline the annual study.
Festivus in a Barbie World
It has been nearly four years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and the trillions of dollars injected into the economy are still haunting the American people. Case in point, fraudsters exploited the incompetence of US bureaucracy and received COVID relief funds from the Paycheck Protection Program by using images of Barbie dolls for proof of identity as part of the verification process. Sen. Paul did not reveal how much these schemers received, but it was part of the $800 billion initiative.
That wasn't the only suspicious use of pandemic money. The Small Business Administration approved $200 million for famous music performers, like Chris Brown ($10 million), Post Malone ($10 million), Lil Wayne ($8.9 million), The Smashing Pumpkins ($8.6 million), and Nickelback ($2 million). And the US government paid $38 million to dead people.
The NIH used $3.8 million in taxpayer funds to investigate "COVID-19 misinformation exposure on social media among Black and Rural communities" to assist in the crusade to "identify and combat misinformation." Meanwhile, the Department of Defense wasted $170 million in equipment by improperly storing engines, transmissions, and military tanks.
No Festivus Miracle for Monkeys
The next laughable component of the Festivus report is the $477,721 transgender monkey study. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease spent nearly half a million dollars at a Florida laboratory to feminize male monkeys. Scientists forced male lab monkeys to become transgender using feminizing hormone therapy (FHT) “to address ‘social injustices’ suffered by ‘transgender persons’” and determine if force-feminized male monkeys were more vulnerable to contracting HIV.
And more monkey business awaits.
Two lab monkeys at the University of Minnesota were forced to gamble for drinking water. Researchers removed parts of the test subjects' skulls, and their brains were injected with tracers for the scientists to study. The monkeys were then given two options on two screens: low-risk and low-reward options and high-risk, high-reward options. Seventy percent of the time, they selected risk. Cost to the taxpayers? $1.8 million.
Another one? The National Institutes of Health-funded (NIH) researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center drugged monkeys with meth in the morning to monitor their sleep habits. Additionally, the scientists inserted wire leads throughout their heads. The study cost $12 million.
While it might seem excessive for observers, the obsession over monkeys was on full display at "Monkey Island" in South Carolina. The NIH billed taxpayers $33.2 million to pay a local business to care, feed, and house 3,000 monkeys before they are sent to research laboratories nationwide. Believe it or not, this program was launched in the 1970s, according to the Festivus study.
"The federal government established the colony in the late 1970s, though the multi-million dollar contract to care for the monkeys changed hands a few times. NIH also paid millions to a large pharmaceutical company to maintain Dr. Fauci’s Monkey Island," the report stated. "Monkey business is a big business."
Cats, Dogs, and Lobsters
Did you know that when it is summer, you get hot? Did you also know that dogs feel the same? Well, the Agricultural Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture funded a Southern Illinois University study to find out this information. Researchers spent a summer walking 16 Labrador retrievers of two different colors and measured their rectal temperatures. They discovered that the animals' fur color did not alter their body temperatures in the summer. It was unknown how much this ground-breaking research cost, but the USDA's research arm receives $1.7 billion annually from Congress.
NIH approved a $2.7 million grant to a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher, who sub-granted experts in St. Petersburg to snip Russian cats' brain stems and force them to walk on a treadmill in Russian labs. The only conclusion made from the study was that they tortured cats.
The Department of Defense acquired a Lobster Tank from a restaurant equipment company in Virginia. The price tag for taxpayers was $8,395.
The Grand Daddy of Waste
Much of the laughable government waste found in the Festivus report represents a fraction of the US budget. However, Sen. Paul alluded to a couple of items in Washington that accounted for a massive amount of the outlandish spending approved on Capitol Hill.
First, the US government spent $659 billion in interest payments on the ballooning national debt. This was up from $475 billion in the previous year's Festivus Report. "Because we don’t have the funds to pay that, we have to borrow it — a large portion from China. We borrow from China to pay the interest on funds we couldn’t afford to spend in the first place," the senator wrote.
Second, the White House issued $236 billion in "improper payments." In other words, the federal government mailed out the wrong checks. The biggest mistakes were related to Medicaid ($50.33 billion), Federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance ($43.55 billion), and Earned Income Tax Credits ($21.88 billion). The good news is that these annual errors were down from $247 billion in the previous year.
While the government’s waste on transgender monkeys and tickets to concerts does not amount to much in a $7 trillion federal budget, the public could only hope that this was all US officials wasted taxpayer resources on. Indeed, it is Social Security and Medicaid, interest payments, foreign wars, and the rest of the mandatory spending that’s sending the country into a fiscal nightmare, not meth-head monkeys. They might even do a better job of running the country.
