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| Rand Paul's 'Festivus Report' exposes $900B in government squander |
| 2023-12-22 |
| [FoxNews] From funding for A-list to money for Egyptian tourism, here's this year's roster of waste. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., released his annual Christmas "Festivus" report Friday for the ninth year in a row, outlining $900 billion in government waste. Among notable instances, the National Institutes of Health allocated funds to study Russian cats on treadmills, photos of Barbies were utilized as identification to obtain COVID relief funds, the Department of Defense lost $169 million of outdoor-stored military gear, $6 million went towards tourism in Egypt by the United States Agency for International Development, and the Small Business Administration provided over $200 million to "struggling" music artists such as Post Malone, Chris Brown, and Lil Wayne. Up from $30 trillion in debt in 2022, this year's debt amounts to $34 trillion, the report also highlights. "Who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt? Everybody," Paul wrote in the report. "This year, members of both parties in Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling, which empowered the government to borrow an unlimited amount of money until 2024. As Congress spends to reward its favored industries and pet projects, the American taxpayers are forced to pay the price through record-high inflation and crippling interest rates." He added: "The same big spenders teamed up, yet again, to continue sending Americans’ hard-earned money to foreign countries and funding endless wars, all while ignoring our porous southern border." Rand's report highlighted government spending that included accepting Barbie doll photos to obtain COVID relief funds from a portion of an $800 billion allocation in Paycheck Protection Program funds. Other expenses highlighted were $659 billion for national debt interest, $33.2 million for transgender monkey research, $6 million for boosting Egyptian tourism, and an unknown cost for USDA's dog-walking research in summer. "Researchers found the Labradors’ fur color did not affect their body temperatures after a hot summer’s walk. That’s it. That’s the taxpayerfunded, cutting-edge study," Paul wrote. "The Agricultural Research Service at the USDA, which funded the study at Southern Illinois University, gets $1.7 billion a year from Congress, but it’s unknown how much the hot dog study cost the taxpayer." Under Dr. Fauci's leadership, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded a study using $477,121 to force-feminize male rhesus macaques in a Florida lab, the report found. The experiment involved administering female hormones to these male monkeys to investigate potential vulnerabilities to HIV, even though critics argue monkeys are not susceptible to HIV. Last year, Paul's report broke down $482 billion in wasteful spending, from the billions spent giving COVID relief funds to ineligible people to a $118,000 study on whether Marvel movie villain Thanos would really be able to snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet. |
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