WASHINGTON – Time to drag your pole out of the crawl space.
In the most wonderful time of the year for Washington budget hawks, Sen. Rand Paul released his annual airing of spending grievances Friday in honor of the “Seinfeld”-immortalized holiday “Festivus.”
From science experiments on transgender monkeys to $38 million in COVID payments to dead people, Paul’s report detailed what he called “a whopping $9 billion of waste” of taxpayer funds.
“Last Festivus, we lamented over the national debt reaching an astronomical $30 trillion,” wrote Paul (R-Ky.).
“Shockingly, in one short year, the career politicians and bureaucrats in Washington have managed to approach $34 trillion in debt, without so much as a second thought.”
Paul blasted both political parties for contributing to the shortfall by voting to raise the debt ceiling in late May, “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 said in the report.
“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.”
“I have a lot of problems with federal spending,” he added, channeling Frank Costanza, “and now it’s time to hear all about them.”
Big bucks for Barbies
Hi, Ken! Wanna defraud the government?
While 2023 was the year of “Barbenheimer,” it was also the year of “Barbencrimer” for some scammers of the $800 billion COVID Paycheck Protection Program, according to the report.
The program, which offered loans to small business owners to keep their workforce employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, used a sketching AI system to verify proof of identity – which swindlers promptly took advantage of.
In lieu of actual employee IDs, some fraudsters uploaded headshots of Barbie dolls to the AI system – which apparently accepted that the obviously plastic faces as “proof of identity” and OK’d sending checks off to the scammers behind the scheme.
“The verification system did not catch the images of dolls uploaded by fraudsters,” the report said.
“Somehow the Small Business Administration carelessly approved the applicants from Toyland and sent out improper COVID-19 PPP payments.”
While it’s unclear how much of the $800 billion in congressionally approved funds made their way into Barbie’s tiny hands, Paul used the opportunity to re-litigate the whole federal response to the outbreak.
“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,” Paul wrote.
“But using Barbie’s face as proof of identity to steal taxpayer dollars was not on my COVID waste bingo card.”
Monday for ‘starving artists’ – like Post Malone
Taking advantage of COVID funds is not always a crime – even if it feels like it, Paul explained.
During the pandemic, the government offered financial relief to entertainment venues hurt by lockdown orders through the Small Business Administration’s Shuttered Venue Operators Grant.
The program, Paul said, “was supposed to provide a lifeline to small entertainment businesses nationwide.”
In reality, the report found, the SBA doled out more than $200 million to “dozens of famous music artists and their touring companies.”
“So-called ‘small business owners,’ such as Post Malone, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, and Smashing Pumpkins, received up to $10 million each,” Paul said.
“Even Nickelback received $2 million.”
Other artists and groups to partake in such grants were Usher ($3.1 million), Leann Rimes ($2 million), Melissa Etheridge ($3.9 million) and Slipknot ($9.7 million).
“While some may claim these funds were used to keep supporting staff,” Paul wrote, “artists were not required to do so, and we have no way of determining how these blank checks were used.”
What a ‘tank’ job
Only the best for our service members — and apparently that means fresh lobster, if the Pentagon’s purchase of a $8,295 lobster tank from a restaurant equipment company in Springfield, Va. is anything to go by.
“We all know that the Department of Defense makes purchases for military operations,” Paul said in the report.
“One would imagine weapons, ammunition, and tanks might be among those purchased items – but according to USASpending.gov, they aren’t the kind of tanks you’re thinking of!”
While the seemingly lavish expense made this year’s Festivus report, the purchase was actually made in late 2016, according to USASpending.gov.
But the Kentucky Republican apparently can’t let a little fact check get in the way of an excellent pun.
“I understand military personnel need to eat, but does the DOD really need a Lobster tank?” Paul wrote.
“I think we can all agree these aren’t the tanks Americans thought their tax dollars were funding. “
Monkeying around
Government funding for brutal experiments on primates made multiple pages of this year’s Festivus report.
First, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spent nearly half a million dollars to forcibly change the gender of male monkeys, according to the report.
“That’s right, the NIAID is using $477,121 of your tax dollars to fund the forced feminization of male rhesus macaques,” Paul said in the report.
“Utilizing taxpayer funds from NIAID, a Florida lab set out to examine what would happen if female hormones were given to male monkeys.”
The reason?
To study whether male monkeys pumped full of female hormones were more susceptible to HIV.
“The lab worked to make male lab monkeys ‘transgender’ to address ‘social injustices’ suffered by ‘transgender persons’ such as ‘transgender women who were assigned a male set at birth but express their gender along a female spectrum,” the report read.
The problem?
“Critics note that monkeys themselves are not susceptible to HIV, and argue injecting the male monkeys with female hormones is unlikely to yield relevant information or to help humans,” Paul noted.
In another experiment, the National Institutes of Health spent $171,000 of your money on studying the gambling habits of monkeys — an experiment that began in 2014 but has continued for nearly a decade later.
The experiment involves putting the monkeys through three sets of tests. the first two of which present “clear patterns” to win, while the third pays out randomly.
What they found was that monkey like to gamble, and that they share humans’ “unfounded belief in winning and losing streaks.”
So keep that in mind next time a monkey says he has a “system” to win at blackjack.
The debt itself
But Paul’s biggest issue is with the $659 billion the federal government paid just to cover the interest on its debts.
“It doesn’t take a genius to predict the dangers that come with spending money that the government just doesn’t have,” Paul wrote.
“Apparently robbing Peter to pay Paul is not a sound fiscal strategy.”
The 2023 interest total is up from the $475 billion paid in interest last year, because “when the national debt jumped even higher this year, the interest payment went up $184 billion,” according to the report.
“Because we don’t have the funds to pay that, we have to borrow it — a large portion from China,” the senator lamented.
“We borrow from China to pay the interest on funds we couldn’t afford to spend in the first place.”
