Senator Rand Paul's annual "Festivus" Report found approximately $900 billion in wasted taxpayer money.The report focuses on poorly run government programs and money used for niche research and activity with dubious benefits. At that rate of wasteful spending, shrinking the government behemoth should be a no-brainer. But all it seems to do is get bigger.
Barbie is the runaway winner from the rampant government waste and incompetence in the 2023 report. As Senator Paul wrote:
The faces of Barbie’s Dream World played a role in the fiscal nightmare that was COVID-19 spending. Government spending was already out of control when Congress approved $800 billion in COVID Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds. As federal agencies hustled to get the funds out quickly, it came as no surprise when swindlers rushed to line up for their cut of the COVID cash.
Some of us saw the writing on the wall and predicted that shutting down our economy and printing more money to pay the nation to stay home from work would be a fiscal disaster. But using Barbie’s face as proof of identity to steal taxpayer dollars was not on my COVID waste bingo card.
Apparently, an AI system that was supposed to quickly verify an applicant's identity did not catch pictures of dolls uploaded to the system. The good news could be that we don't have to worry about Skynet any time soon. However, the bad news is taxpayers are out $800 billion.
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It probably surprises no one that Paul took a deep dive into Dr. Anthony Fauci's spending this year. The two famously sparred several times over research at the Wuhan lab funded by Fauci's department at the National Institutes of Health. Here is a sample of NIH studies funded on the taxpayer dime. See if you can spot where any of them are aimed at curing the primary diseases that disable and kill Americans.
- $2.7 million on documenting how Russian cats could walk on a treadmill after having their brainstems snipped.
- $12 million to administer methamphetamines to Rhesus monkeys in the morning and monitor their sleep patterns through implanted wire leads running subcutaneously from a head incision and exiting the eyeball underneath the upper eyelid.
- $3.7 million to remove parts of monkeys' skulls and inject tracers to monitor their behavior as they gambled between two different options on two different screens. "Gambling" determined their access to drinking water.
- $477,721 was spent by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) to give female hormones to male monkeys to see if this made them less susceptible to HIV. Critics note monkeys are not susceptible to HIV and wonder what the study was trying to accomplish.
Paul is also a staunch free speech and medical freedom advocate. His report points out how much money the government spent trying to manipulate Americans' perspective on "misinformation" and "disinformation" in the era of COVID-19. It is unclear how much the Department of Homeland Security needed to spend on its first and second graphic novels on "disinformation." However, any government agency with a clear partisan mission spending money trying to sway the public's opinion is a huge issue. Especially one headed by Alejandro Mayorkas.
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The rest of the report is just as disturbing to anyone interested in future generations not drowning in debt. As Paul notes:
It doesn’t take a genius to predict the dangers that come with spending money that the government just doesn’t have. When the government overspent by $1.7 trillion in FY2023, we were left with a whopping $659 billion in interest payments.
You read that right. In Fiscal Year 2023, the U.S. Department of the Treasury spent $659 billion just to pay the interest on the national debt. 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.
It is time to consider what this means for our children and grandchildren. And it's time to pick candidates with the courage to say our spending and entitlements must be reformed—even the Boomers whose entitlements will not be touched. Gen X and millennials will bear the burden of giving Gen Z and Gen Alpha a better future. So vote for sanity—and fiscal responsibility. Not another old man promising not to touch your Social Security.
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