In the report, the libertarian senator concludes that the government squandered an astronomical sum of 900,000 million dollars, far exceeding the 482,000 million dollars wasted in 2022.
Who does Paul blame for this excessive spending? Everyone. According to the senator, politicians from both parties agreed to increase the debt ceiling and finance the government's absurd expenses with taxpayers' money.
The "Festivus Report" outlined several of the federal government's most inexplicable examples of waste.
Senator Rand Paul's "Festivus Report" by emmanuel.rondon on Scribd
Scams with photos of Barbies
For example, a group of scammers used photos of Barbie dolls to obtain COVID relief funds.
More specifically, the scammers used the photos to set up a profile to apply for the Small Business Administration's (SBA) Pandemic Paycheck Protection Program.
The artificial intelligence system did not detect the scam and sent taxpayer money to the scammers.
The government financed experiments with "trans" monkeys and "fit" cats
But that's not all. According to the report, under the leadership of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded a series of peculiar experiments with American money.
One of them was in a Florida laboratory, where the institute "feminized" or converted male monkeys into transsexual monkeys to assess their exposure to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
"The lab worked to make male lab monkeys' transgender' to address 'social injustices' suffered by 'transgender persons' such as 'transgender women (TGW)-individuals who were assigned a male sex at birth but express their gender along a female spectrum,'" the report reads.
Critics of the experiment said the monkeys are not actually susceptible to HIV. $477,121 was used to fund the study.
In fact, the federal government spent a lot of taxpayer money on monkeys, the "Festivus Report" revealed.
For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) paid a local company a staggering $33.2 million to care for some 3,000 monkeys on a South Carolina island before shipping them to research laboratories nationwide.
Part of the experiment was to give these monkeys methamphetamine in the morning to study their sleeping habits. The NIH also approved funding for these studies.
In another strange case, the NIH approved a $2.7 million grant that was used, in part, to study Russian cats walking on a treadmill.
Billionaire artists received subsidies due to the pandemic
Despite being extravagant examples, animals did not represent the government's largest expense.
For example, the SBA, i.e., COVID funds, also gave $200 million in pandemic support to "small business" artists. According to Paul's report, that list included names of established artists and billionaires such as Usher, Nickelback, Post Malone, Chris Brown, Smashing Pumpkins and Lil Wayne.
Likewise, the costs of ruining military equipment amounted to 169 million dollars.
The senator's report clarifies that, in fiscal year 2023, one of the largest expenses was borne by the Treasury, which spent $659 billion on interest on the national debt alone, much of which it borrowed from China.
"We borrow from China to pay the interest on funds we couldn't afford to spend in the first place," the report says, pointing to many more government wastes of taxpayers.
"As always, taking the path to fiscal responsibility is often a lonely journey, but, as I've done in years past, I will continue my fight against government waste this holiday season," Paul said.
