Libertarian-minded Sen. Rand Paul released his ninth annual 'Festivus' Report, this year detailing some $900 billion in government waste. Such waste included photos of Barbie dolls were held up as identification by fraudsters looking to grab cash from the Covid Paycheck Protection Program, $33 million that went to a 'monkey colony' in South Carolina, $6 million for Egyptian tourism and a nearly $1 million grant to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a study on Russian cats on treadmills.

The study also highlighted some $38 million in Covid payments that went out to dead people. The federal government also made a whopping $236 billion in 'improper federal payments,' whether through Medicaid, unemployment, or tax credits. Another $4 million was spent on studying Covid 'misinformation' in black and rural communities. It also noted some $200 million doled out as Covid relief through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program. Artists like Post Malone, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, and Smashing Pumpkins got $10 million a piece from the program, meant to help small business owners.

U.S. Army officials 'improperly stored 80 gas turbine engines,' valued at $89 million, and 135 hydraulic transmissions, valued at $12 million, and wasted '117,534 vehicular track shoes' valued at $68.29 million left outside in the open air, according to the report. ‘"Don’t leave it out in the rain" seems like simple and basic training,' Paul mused. The Department of Defense spent another $9,000 on a lobster tank. The NIH, funded by taxpayers, ran a $12 million study on the sleeping habits of monkeys given meth in the morning.

Monkeys were dosed and tracked 'through implanted wire leads running “subcutaneously from the head incision to the eye orbit, exiting the eye orbit from underneath the upper eyelid.”' Paul noted that $400 million is sitting untouched in a presidential campaign fund. When Americans fill out their tax returns, there is a box they can tick off if they want $3 to go to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund Account, a fund for campaigns that no presidential candidate has ever accepted. In another controversial NIH study that cost taxpayers $3.7 million, monkeys were forced to gamble for their drinking water after researchers removed part of their skulls and injected them with tracers to monitor their brains.

Paul hit out at Dr. Anthony Fauci for the NIH's animal experiments. 'Under Dr. Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was back in the business of wasting your money and torturing animals,' he wrote, pointing to a transgender monkey study. 'The NIAID is using $477,121 of your tax dollars to fund the forced feminization of male rhesus macaques. Utilizing taxpayer funds from NIAID, a Florida lab set out to examine what would happen if female hormones were given to male monkeys.' '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 set at birth but express their gender along a female spectrum.'

Meanwhile, America's debt has reached $34 trillion, up from $30 trillion in 2022. Some $659 billion went to interest on the debt this year. 'Who’s to blame for our crushing level of debt? Everybody,' Paul wrote in the report. 'This year, members of both parties in Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling, which empowered the government to borrow an unlimited amount of money until 2024. As Congress spends to reward its favored industries and pet projects, the American taxpayers are forced to pay the price through record-high inflation and crippling interest rates.'

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