OPINION:
Slimming down is a perennial favorite New Year’s resolution. For some, the willpower fades fast. Gym usage skyrockets in January before falling off before the end of the year. The federal government lacks the discipline to even attempt self-improvement.
In 2024, the Biden administration cooked up more than 106,000 pages worth of new regulations — as if the 90,402 pages of red tape generated in 2023 weren’t sufficient. Regulatory obesity is out of hand, and government continues to spend money we don’t have.
As documented in Sen. Rand Paul’s annual Festivus Report, $1 trillion in taxpayer funds went to unproductive endeavors. Among the biggest-ticket items on the Kentucky Republican’s list is the $15.5 billion the Department of Energy spent in 2024 to encourage Americans to buy electric cars they don’t want.
And $10 billion was lavished on upkeep of empty buildings. The senator isn’t referring to the government offices that are mostly vacant because federal workers don’t bother showing up in person anymore — the Government Accountability Office found an occupancy rate of less than 25% at 17 agency headquarters. Instead, Mr. Paul is talking about 77,000 vacant properties that accrue ongoing leasing and maintenance costs that get put on the taxpayers’ tab.
Among the nearly — but not completely — empty structures is the Harry S. Truman Building that serves the handful of bureaucrats who show up at the State Department to approve spending on nonsensical overseas programs. These include $3 million for “Girl-Centered Climate Action” in Brazil and $32,596 that went toward raising awareness of breakdancing.
Foggy Bottom’s finest also gave a green light for the expenditure of $123,066 to teach youth in Kyrgyzstan about the best ways to go “viral” on social media. And $4.8 million bankrolled social media influencers who talk about Ukraine. “Apparently, what we really need in a war zone are more Instagram stories and TikTok dances,” Mr. Paul wrote.
Here at home, the National Science Foundation devoted $288,563 to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion among bird-watching groups. The Department of Health and Human Services approved a $419,470 grant for running experiments on rats. The goal was to determine whether vermin raised in a “positive” environment would be more likely or less likely to snort cocaine than rats raised in a “negative” cage.
Mr. Paul is particularly appalled by the “medieval-type experiments” conducted against our feline friends at a cost of $1,513,299. The University of Pittsburgh took a federal grant to tie kittens to a fast, whirling table to evaluate motion sickness.
A slightly less gruesome but no less dystopian $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts was used to place a 16-foot-tall statue of a pigeon on a New York street.
Not to be outdone, the National Endowment for the Humanities contributed $388,863 to help propel a six-episode podcast called “Magic in the United States.” It’s one of the $7 million worth of taxpayer-backed projects promoting magic, instead of something more useful — say reading and math for 12th graders.
According to the Department of Education, 1 in 5 American adults lack the literacy skills “sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences.”
That shouldn’t come as a surprise when more effort is spent teaching foreigners how to go viral while breakdancing than teaching our own kids to read. Let’s hope the new year brings a lasting resolve to slim down Uncle Sam.
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