Senator Rand Paul released his Fall 2019 “Waste Report” earlier this week to highlight some of the bizarre expenditures the U.S. government is carrying out.
Among these spending programs include “self-cleaning toilets that cost over $500,000 to maintain, and studies on nicotine-addicted Zebrafish.”
This latest update of Paul’s “Waste Report” included $230 million of unusual spending items.
This list contains the following projects:
- Bob Dylan statue for the embassy in Mozambique (State): $84,375
- Research that involves hooking Zebrafish on nicotine (NIH): $708,466
- Brought Serbian cheese up to international standards (USAID): $22,000,000
- Studied the connection between drinking alcohol and winding up in the ER (NIH): $4,658,865
Paul’s report also spilled the beans on “Operation Golden Potty.” The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Office of the Inspector General coined this name.
According to the OIG, the Metro spent “approximately $500,000 maintaining a single, self-cleaning toilet located at the Huntington Metro Station” from 2003 to 2017.
The OIG added that it “cannot definitively state how much was spent because Metro lost invoices for 2007, 2012, 2013, and 2014.”
Metro rationalized dropping money on the toilet because it was needed to attend customers’ “security concerns” following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Paul’s report ultimately warned readers to not view isolated cases of spending largesse as a “drop in the bucket” because “it all adds up to massive budget deficits” in total.
The Kentucky Senator has made fiscal responsibility a fixture of his political career.
This “Waste Report” is the latest demonstration of his dedication to promoting fiscal sanity in a Senate body that has ultimately abandoned this cause.
Hopefully, his Senate colleagues eventually get the memo.
