Senator Paul addresses concerns about spending in annual report

Just in time for Christmas, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Friday released his 2023 “Festivus Report,” with this year’s roundup documenting more than $900 billion in government waste over the past year.

Paul, writing in the foreword of his ninth annual “grievances” report, said “everybody” is to blame for the nation’s “crushing level of debt,” as members of both parties in Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling, empowering 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,” Paul said.

Among this year’s highlights:

• The National Institutes of Health spent part of a $2.7 million grant to study Russian cats walking on a treadmill.
• Barbie photos were used as proof of ID for receiving COVID Paycheck Protection Program funds.
• The Department of Defense ruined over $169 million worth of military equipment by leaving it outside.
• The United States Agency for International Development spent $6 million to promote tourism in Egypt.
• The Small Business Administration gave ‘struggling’ music artists like Post Malone, Chris Brown, and Lil Wayne over $200 million.

The lion’s share of the spending, Paul noted, was in spending billions to pay the interest on national debt. 

“When the government overspent by $1.7 trillion in FY2023, we were left with a whopping $659 billion in interest payments,” Paul said. “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.”

The interest payments were also a large part of Paul’s 2022 report, which showed the Treasury Department spent $475 billion on interest payments. 

Paul said another huge expenditure came to maintain what has come to be known in South Carolina as Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “Monkey Island.”

The 3,000-monkey colony, located on a state-owned island, was financed with a $33.2 million contract the National Institutes of Health (NIH) signed with a local business to care for the monkeys before they go to research labs nationwide. The NIH also paid millions to a large pharmaceutical company to maintain “Dr. Fauci’s Monkey Island,” Paul said. 

Another spending highlight came when the Department of Agriculture supported a summer study that walked 16 labrador retrievers, of two different colors, and measured their rectal temperatures, determining that their fur color did not affect their body temperatures after a hot summer’s walk.

The Agricultural Research Service at the USDA, which funded the study at Southern Illinois University, gets $1.7 billion a year from Congress, Paul noted, but said he is not sure how much the dog study cost taxpayers. 

The cat study involved the U.S. footing the bill for Russian labs snipping cats’ brain stems and forcing them to walk on a treadmill. 

“These catwalks were part of a $2.7 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant given to a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the U.S.,” said Paul. “The Institute then sub-granted the funds to researchers in St. Petersburg, Russia — a fact first uncovered by White Coat Waste Project in 2021.”

Justin Goodman, senior vice president of the White Coat Waste Project, on Friday lauded the Paul report, particularly when it comes to animal research. 

“A growing majority of taxpayers — Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike —oppose Uncle Sam’s wasteful, dangerous, and cruel animal experiments at home and abroad and don’t want to be forced to pay billions for these boondoggles,” said Goodman. “We’re proud to work with Sen. Paul on bipartisan efforts to find, expose, and defund $20 billion in wasteful government animal experiments in the U.S., Wuhan, and hundreds of other labs overseas.”

Among other findings, Paul noted the U.S. spent $38 million in COVID payments, an average of $83,000 each to people the government knew were dead, with $10 million paid to individuals who were already dead on the date someone applied for funding for them.

“The government doled out $1.3 million of your money to 30 individuals who were dead for at least a year, in what fraud inspectors deemed one of the particularly egregious examples,” Paul said.