Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) released his 10th annual “Festivus Report” on wasteful government spending.
“It’s hard to decide where to start these grievances,” Paul wrote on X. “Every year, I think, there can’t be THAT many more can there? But when you’re surrounded by people in Congress every day, it’s not a problem at all.”
He added that he was a “one-man @DOGE before @DOGE was a gleam in the eyes of amped up tech executives, and new media barons got behind the idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’m VERY happy they’re here. I passed along 2,000 pages of waste to @ElonMusk and @VivekGRamaswamy in the interest of curbing government waste. Now, they don’t have to work too hard to find what I’ve already found.”
“This year, I am highlighting a whopping $1,008,313,329,626.12. That’s over $1 trillion in government waste, including things like ice-skating drag queens, a $12 Million Las Vegas pickleball complex, $4,840,082 on Ukrainian influencers, and more! No matter how much money the government has wasted, politicians keep demanding even more,” Paul wrote in the report.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spent $2 million on a grant to “study kids looking at Facebook ads about food,” the report says. “One might reasonably predict that this latest study will echo the findings of its predecessors, reaffirming what we already know—ads work, and they work well. However, is this the most pressing issue that warrants such a hefty investment of federal funds?” it adds.
HHS also spent more than $400,000 to “investigate whether rats placed in positive environments would be more likely to abstain from cocaine than rats in negative and isolating environments.”
More than $7 million was spent on “various magical projects,” the report notes. “Thanks to the visionary minds at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in cooperation with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, we can revel in the mystifying podcast, ‘Magic in the United States.'”
Furthermore, instead of investing in the United States’ border security, the Department of State spent $12.1 million on Paraguayan Border Security.
The report also drew attention to numerous experiments involving cats. These experiments involved whether felines can contract COVID-19, motion sickness, being “strapped to a hydraulic table that tilts and spins them in all directions,” and electric shock.
The U.S. Navy also wasted nearly $90 billion on ineffective Navy ships. The vessels with the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program have “demonstrated an astonishing number of failures.”
“This gigantic waste far exceeds the definition of egregious when our nation is more than $36 trillion in debt,” the report says. “We are drowning in debt, but the only thing we’re throwing overboard is fiscal sanity.”