Republican Senator Rand Paul (KY) recently released his latest “Festivus” report for 2021, documenting $52,598,515,585 worth of government waste.
Paul, who is the chairman of ETSO (Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight), which is a Subcommittee for HSGAC (Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee), orchestrates the Festivus report as a means of “alert[ing] the American people” about how the federal government wastes the public’s “hard-earned money.”
Spending waste is broken down by section, it includes COVID-related spending, miscellaneous expenditure, and Afghanistan costs. For example, $11.3 million was spent through the USAID just to as the Vietnamese people “to stop burning their trash.”
Congress also gave the Wilson Center $14 million to “throw swanky parties” for congressional members, and $465,000 in waste was used by the NIH to conduct insane experiments in Portland Oregon where efforts were made to “create a token-based economy” wherein “pigeons are taught to gamble with slot machines.”
The report details how the federal government spent “money we don’t have on things we don’t need.” It also spells out how $8 trillion was added to the national debt, which sat at $20 trillion as of the last Festivus report from 2020.
Using the staggering $53 billion figure of waste that the report details, Senator Paul ran the math that using the average taxpayer bill of $15,332, the federal government managed to completely blow 3,430,636 people’s tax dollars on junk programs that do absolutely no good for the public.
He points out that this is roughly equivalent to the population of Los Angeles, Chicago, or over 50 times the size of Bowling Green, KY, the Senator’s hometown.
The majority of the waste was spent on bad COVID-19 initiatives, accounting for $40,316,270,000 of the total waste for 2021. $4.29 billion was burned up in “bad loans out of the Paycheck Protection Program” as well as $35 billion spent on “wasted unemployment insurance payments. Another $1.27 million got lost on “COVID relief funds for students who… weren’t enrolled.”
Miscellaneous wasted accounted for over $8 billion, such as a $250 million project that was used to build border walls in North Africa and the Middle East (ironic), $179 million spent on a State Department pet project to “fund green energy programs in Africa” and a whopping $200,000 just to teach “France about U.S. culture.”
Author: Michelle Cooper
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