Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul (released his 2021 "Festivus Report" on Wednesday, detailing a total of $52,598,515,585 in government waste.
The feds' reaction (or over-reaction) to the Covid pandemic accounted for a large chunk of that waste, the report said.
More than $40 billion (and counting) was wasted on Covid-19, including $4.29 billion in “bad loans out of the Paycheck Protection Program,” as much as $36 billion in “wasted unemployment insurance payments,” and $1.27 million in “COVID relief funds for students who actually weren’t enrolled” in one Baltimore school, the report said.
Based on the reported government waste, Sen. Paul pointed out that, with an average taxpayer bill of $15,332, the federal government “wasted the taxes of 3,430,636 people.”
“That is roughly the population of Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; or 50.74 times the size of Senator Paul’s hometown of Bowling Green, KY,” the report noted.
Another $549 million worth of your taxpayer dollars was spent on aircraft for the Afghan Air Force, only to see the aircraft later junked at a “scrap” value of $40,257.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio allocated $25 million of taxpayer-funded federal Covid relief dollars to launch the “City Arts Corps,” paying 3,000 artists to publicly display creative works in an effort to “resurge the cultural scene” in the City.
Here are just a few of the ways the feds flushed your taxpayer dollars down the drain, according to Sen. Paul:
• $14 million for the Wilson Center — which “throws swanky parties for members of Congress.”
• $11.3 million spent by USAID to instruct the people of Vietnam “to stop burning their trash.”
• $4.5 million to Triple F Farms for the breeding and transporting of ferrets to COVID-19 and influenza vaccine testing laboratories.
• $465,000 granted by the NIH to Reed College of Portland, Oregon, to “create a token-based economy where pigeons are taught to gamble with slot machines.”
• $200,000 for the State Department U.S. Mission program to “enhance the understanding of the United States in France.”
• A $150,000 USAID grant to send ten Koreans aged 15-30 to Washington, D.C. for two weeks to learn about climate change activism.
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