Cats on Treadmills, Transgender Monkeys: 9 Craziest Items Found in Rand Paul’s ‘Festivus’ Government Waste Report

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) releases his annual “Festivus Report” every year, highlighting some of the most absolutely egregious forms of government waste that year.

This year’s “Festivus” — the made-up holiday during which one airs his grievances, created by legendary television father Frank Costanza in the hit sitcom Seinfeld — reports $900,000,000,000 in government waste in 2023. Here are some of the most shocking examples, straight from the report:

1. $6 million to boost tourism in … Egypt.

According to the report, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $6 million to boost tourism in a country that is not America, contending that it was a “value investment in sustainable integrated tourism.” This initiative will run through September 2024:

2. Portion of $2.7 million to study cats on a treadmill

This occurred under part of a $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is not as innocent as it sounds, either. According to Paul’s report, the felines had their brain stems “snipped” and were then “forced to walk on a treadmill in Russian labs.”

3. $8,395 for a lobster tank

It is as simple as it sounds. The Department of Defense (DOD) can be thanked for this confusing, bougie purchase.

Tank with fresh lobsters and crabs, Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña, Galicia, Spain (Stock photo via Getty)

4. $89 million in engines

Officials reportedly “improperly stored 80 gas turbine engines,” which cost more than $1 million each. In other words, they left them outside instead of properly storing them.

5. Portion of $12 million on meth monkeys

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not just fund brain-stem-snapped cats walking on treadmills in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They also contributed funds to researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, which monitored monkeys after giving them meth in the morning. This was done via “implanted wire leads running ‘subcutaneously from the head incision to the eye orbit, exiting the eye orbit from underneath the upper eyelid,’” as detailed in Paul’s Festivus report.

6. $171,000 on gambling monkeys

For some reason, the National Science Foundation is still spending thousands studying gambling monkeys.

SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images

7. $236 billion on “improper federal payments”

There have been some major accounting issues under the Biden administration.

“This year, the Biden Administration sent out a whopping $236 billion in inaccurate checks, otherwise known as ‘improper payments,'” Paul’s report reads.

“Federal law defines the term as payments made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason,” it adds.

More than $50 billion of those mistakes were confined to Medicaid alone.

8. $3.8 million to study coronavirus “misinformation”

This University of Pennsylvania study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), does not just target any coronavirus “misinformation,” but that among “Black and Rural communities.”

Per Paul’s report:

When the study began in September 2022, much of what the government and social media called COVID “misinformation” (relating to masks, vaccine efficacy, and the virus’ origins) is what is simply called “true” this year.

Will truth complicate their 5-year COVID “misinformation” study?

9. $477,121 on transgender monkeys

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), under the leadership of former director Dr. Anthony Fauci, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to “force-feminize” male monkeys by giving them female hormones. They were then “tested to see if they were more susceptible to HIV,” per Paul’s report, which added that “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.'”