Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) released his annual Festivus Report on Friday, detailing how Uncle Sam burned taxpayer dollars on initiatives such as hamster fight clubs and an experiment to see whether Thanos could snap his fingers in real life.
The conservative lawmaker identified more than $482 billion of wasteful spending in this year’s Festivus Report, the majority of which came from $475 billion of interest payments on the national debt. Servicing the federal government’s obligations now surpasses the combined value of both veterans’ benefits and transportation expenditures.
“The spending is way beyond anything we have seen before. And the big spenders aren’t done trying,” Paul said. “If we don’t stop this and change course, we will have a massive problem.”
One example of wasteful spending was a study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, which fitted seven beagle puppies with a drug-injecting jacket. Alongside another study that injected six beagles with cocaine from March 2020 and March 2021, the agency spent $2.3 million on the initiatives. “What’s up with your government’s obsession with getting animals high?” the Festivus Report asked.
The studies were commissioned by SRI International, which took funds from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to poison and “de-bark” beagle puppies.
The National Institutes of Health also granted Northeastern University more than $3 million over the course of three decades to inject steroids in hamsters and watch the rodents fight to determine whether current drugs for aggressive youth suppress steroid-induced aggression. Although the first rule of fight club is usually to not talk about fight club, an open records request forced Georgia State University earlier this year to release details of a similar study that used $1.5 million of federal funds to leverage gene editing and create aggressive fighting hamsters.
Researchers at Georgia Tech received nearly $119,000 from the National Science Foundation to see whether a real-life version of fictional Marvel villain Thanos could “actually snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet,” according to the Festivus Report. The researchers determined that the comic book nemesis could not, in fact, produce a snapping sound. Invoking the words of Captain America, the Festivus Report said that the National Science Foundation was clearly “not looking for forgiveness for wasting American taxpayers’ hard-earned money” and “way past asking for permission.”
The National Institutes of Health also granted the National Human Genome Research Institute more than $2.1 million over the course of five years in an effort to encourage rural Ethiopians to wear shoes. Another project from the agency gave $188,000 to researchers at Kent State University attempting to learn whether “the relationship between pets and children is beneficial to mental health.” Unsurprisingly, the answer to the question was in the affirmative.
Beyond the examples of rampant government spending through research grants, Paul also noted the $1.7 billion spent on maintaining empty federal buildings and the $4.5 billion spent to give ineligible citizens Economic Injury Disaster Loan grants through the Small Business Administration. Over one-third of the disbursements were made to ineligible participants.
The Festivus Report comes as the national debt surpasses $31 trillion for the first time in history, implying over $94,000 in liabilities per citizen and nearly $249,000 per taxpayer.