Sen. Rand Paul Releases His Annual Report on Federal Spending
December 26, 2024 | Washington, D.C.
by Tabitha Walter, Executive Director, Eagle Forum
While many of us celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah, one “holiday” receives less attention. Festivus was made popular 27 years ago on the hit sitcom Seinfeld. One character, Frank Costanza, decides to buck the commercialization of Christmas and instead, gathers his family on December 23rd for an “airing of grievances.” Now, Festivus elicits many memes and, on Capitol Hill, a report from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on wasteful spending. We want to highlight some of the more notable examples of government waste from his report.
Sen. Paul’s Festivus Report highlights the ridiculous and unethical initiatives that our federal government funds. The national debt has hit an all-time high at $35.46 trillion and American taxpayers are paying $892 billion in interest for fiscal year 2024 alone. The House Budget Committee reported that we owe an additional $6.4 billion in new debt per day. No amount of wasteful spending is too low or too high to oppose and eliminate in the face of so much debt. As Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza says, “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people, and now you’re gonna hear about it!”
In 2024, cats were the losers. President Donald Trump was mocked for saying, “They’re eating the cats in Ohio…” but in reality, our own government was doing worse things to felines. Dr. Anthony Fauci funded COVID-19 experiments on cats, injecting them with the virus to observe their suffering. The government spent $10.85 million to study constipation in cats and another $1.5 million was used to spin cats to study motion sickness. The details of these experiments were extremely grotesque and unethical.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government was handing out money like candy with very little oversight, resulting in rampant fraud. We are still dealing with the aftermath four years later! For example, a man in Florida submitted 16 fraudulent applications for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, requesting nearly $12 million and receiving $5 million of your taxpayer dollars. He then acquired an additional $3 million through Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDLs). The now felon used that money to purchase a private island. He isn’t the only one who participated in such a scheme. An estimated $280 billion has been stolen from COVID-19 relief funds with an additional $123 billion misused.
Our bad spending habits spread to international programs as well. The State Department spent $3 million in Brazil to promote “Girl-Centered Climate Action.” This very specific initiative serves to indoctrinate young girls into “woke” culture. Paul said in his report, “Last time I checked, birds, trees, and oceans don’t really care who’s leading the charge to save them, and neither should we.”
It’s no surprise that the Biden administration tried to censor conservative voices, but in one program, they enlisted the help of the British. The Department of State gave $330,000 to the Global Disinformation Index to create a blacklist of non-liberal media. Media outlets such as The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and One America News were labeled “risky” whereas leftist sources like The New York Times, HuffPost, and Buzzfeed were labeled “less risky.”
Sen. Paul’s report has many other wasteful line items such as a $10,000 grant to the Bearded Ladies on Ice — a cabaret show on ice skates focused on climate change — and a $288,563 grant to create “inclusive” bird-watching groups. Even Sesame Street received $20 million to promote “inclusivity” and “mutual respect” in Iraq. You can read his entire humorous, yet alarming Festivus Report here.
If you are wondering how this keeps happening, look no further than the Continuing Resolutions (CR) that Congress passes. With the House having a slight majority of Republicans, the Senate with a Democrat majority, and a Democrat in the White House, Congress has been unable to pass appropriations bills that cut spending and other wasteful programs. Last week, we reported on a CR full of Democrat pork that was on a pathway to the President’s desk. However, President-elect Trump and his team stepped in to object to the bloated bill.
Elon Musk created quite an uproar on X, and a new deal was negotiated that was basically a “clean” CR without any supplemental, agriculture, or pet project funds, but did include a late addition from President-elect Trump — a two-year elimination of the debt ceiling so that the Trump administration would have had unlimited spending power. This is a bad precedent to start even though it would have made cutting taxes easier in the short term. This did not set well with the House Freedom Caucus.
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX), who came under fire for not backing Musk’s plan, posted on X:
“My position is simple - I am not going to raise or suspend the debt ceiling (racking up more debt) without significant & real spending cuts attached to it. I’ve been negotiating to that end. No apologies.”
The Musk deal failed by a vote of 235-174 on the eve of the government funding deadline. The next morning, with just hours until a shutdown, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced he had a deal to pass a three-month “clean” CR with nothing attached. Because it was being rushed through, the Speaker would have to avoid the usual 72-hour rule that allows Members three days to read a bill, and which allows a bill to pass with a simple majority. If he wanted it passed that day, two-thirds of the House would have to agree. This seemed like an impossible task, but he pulled it off. The CR passed by a vote of 366-34, averting a government shutdown six hours before the deadline, without all the Democrats’ policy proposals. The final bill was better than both the original CR and the debt-limit CR that went down to defeat.
While CRs are not ideal nor fiscally conservative, we understand the dynamics at play. To lose all the extra baggage in the original CR and keep the three-month deadline to ensure that President Trump can have a say in the new fiscal year is a huge win! In the new Congress, we expect more fiscally responsible measures such as cuts to wasteful spending, and regular order for all appropriations bills. Most of all, we are glad that the 118th Congress has officially concluded and that a Republican majority in the House, Senate, and White House awaits us in the New Year.