Rand Paul Just Released ‘Festivus Report’ Detailing Government Excess

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Dec 23, 2020

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, fully embracing the holiday spirit, released his annual “Festivus Report,” in which he exposes government excess and spending.

And given the fact that Congress just passed a $2.3 trillion spending package stuffed to the gills with pork spending, he’s got a lot to talk about.

via Washington Examiner:

For Seinfeld aficionados, Dec. 23 is Festivus — a secular holiday created by author Daniel O’Keefe and popularized by the show’s Frank Costanza. O’Keefe’s son Dan O’Keefe co-wrote an episode that featured the spoof holiday. Key features of the holiday include a bare aluminum pole, demonstrating feats of strength, and of course, the airing of grievances.

“Spending was about 50% higher than last year, and payments of interest on the public debt remained extremely high at $387 billion. If you laid out that many $1 bills end to end, it’d be enough to wrap around the earth 1,506 times,” Paul wrote. “Our debt puts at risk the long-term solvency of major programs such as Social Security. And why? To pay for test tubes for COVID tests that turn out to be soda bottles?”

Paul’s report documented more than $54.7 billion worth of “totally wasted money.” He points to specific projects and studies that received federal funding and identifies the total value of grants used to conduct the research.

Some of the waste that was detailed in the report comes from failed missions, like the staggering $8.6 billion we dropped in Afghanistan to help increase counternarcotics efforts, to the $23.9 billion the government blew “trying unsuccessfully to replace the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.”

And then there’s the $1.3 million that wasted on doing research to find out whether or not people would knowingly eat ground up bugs. Yes, that is really something they wasted our money on.

To round things off, the federal government spent $2 million to find out if hot tubs help reduce stress.

The report also identified $896,000 that was spent by the National Institutes of Health “to give cigarettes to adolescent kids to test their reactions to various levels of nicotine in the cigarettes.”

“Congress has every tool it needs to fight and end government waste,” Paul stated in his report. “It’s just a matter of finding the willpower to use them. Rest assured, I will keep fighting for fiscal sanity and providing my colleagues in Congress with the opportunity to find their fiscal backbone!”