The government funded companies in Russia and China for unusual projects such as cartoons for gender equality and experiments with cats on treadmills

Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst revealed Wednesday that the government had given millions of dollars to Chinese and Russian entities to promote “gender equality” through cartoons, cat experiments and other “nonsense” projects.

Ernst worked with the nonprofit Open the Books and tracked many taxpayer-funded grants that would evidence “reckless spending” by the government over the past five years.

“Washington’s continued spending is so out of hand, it is losing track of Americans’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars, but I am creating accountability for every penny,” the senator said.

The report reveals that between 2017 and 2022, the U.S. gave at least $490 million to Chinese entities and another $870 million to Russian entities for odd projects.

According to the investigation, the State Department gave nearly $58.7 million to China, of which almost $100,000 was used to promote “gender equality” through New Yorker magazine cartoons.

A $51.6 million Department of Defense grant allocated $6 million to a Chinese technology company to provide “deployment and distribution command” software for the U.S. military.

The report also highlighted the millions of taxpayer dollars , the Chinese laboratory that may have leaked the coronavirus that caused the recent pandemic.

It also notes that the Department of Health and Human Services gave a Russian state laboratory more than $770,000 to put “cats on treadmills” and another $4.7 million to a Russian company for research on alcohol and addiction.

“When I followed the trail, it is gravely concerning that the final destination of more than $1.3 billion U.S. tax dollars was pointless projects in China and Russia,” Ernst told DailyMail.com.

Following these findings, the senator introduced a bill with Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, to ensure greater transparency in future payments to both China and Russia.

The Tracking Receipts to Adversarial Countries for Knowledge of Spending (TRACKS) Act would require government agencies to publish the grants they make to the country’s major adversaries.