We conclude our summary of key points of government waste from Senator Rand Paul.
The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency that made itself the arbiter of “misinformation” during the COVID pandemic, created a series of graphic novels, called the “Resilience Series,” to help educate the public about misinformation. There is nothing comical about wasting taxpayer money to justify censorship of constitutionally protected speech.
The first in the series was called “Real Fake” and featured a foreign operation created to spread misinformation about a U.S. Senator and impact U.S. elections.
DC Comics won’t be adding these taxpayer-funded comic books from America’s Cyber Defense Agency (CISA) to their repertoire anytime soon. Using the tired old trope that, “disinformation campaigns are a direct threat to our democracy,” CISA spent time and money telling people what to believe about COVID vaccines and helping to suppress debate and discussion about the new vaccine technology and its potential side effects.
CISA’s latest graphic novel even dips into the conspiracy theory that Russia created a “disinformation pandemic” around COVID. In fact, few did more to cause mistrust than the U.S. government and its cover-up experts like Dr. Fauci, who, we now know, pushed disinformation on mask and vaccine efficacy, while obfuscating our government’s involvement with dangerous gain-of-function coronavirus research.
The First Amendment is kryptonite for our government censors.
National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center gave lab monkeys meth in the morning and tracked the monkeys’ sleep habits through implanted wire leads running “subcutaneously from the head incision to the eye orbit, exiting the eye orbit from underneath the upper eyelid.”
The study was funded by portions of four NIH grants and brought to Senator Paul’s attention by the White Coat Waste Project.
Over 100,000 Americans die of meth overdoses each year as these dangerous drugs pour across our open borders. Our nation’s first responders and families across the country struggle every day to fight this drug epidemic, and yet NIH approved a portion of approximately $12 million in NIH grants to test the sleep habits of monkeys given meth in the morning?
Every year, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reroutes incoming tax payments to a fund set aside for U.S. presidential campaigns. The account is funded by a $3 IRS tax return check box. Since 2008, no major political party’s candidate for president has accepted the funds. As of November 1, 2023: $400.6 million sat unused in the Presidential Election Campaign Fund Account.
Why do we provide unused and unnecessary welfare for politicians and their presidential campaigns? It’s time to scrap the wasteful Presidential Election Campaign check off program.
Two laboratory monkeys at the University of Minnesota faced high stakes as their access to drinking water hung in the balance, contingent upon their willingness to embrace what researchers termed “gambling.”
To study the region of the brain that impacts risk-taking choices, parts of monkeys’ skulls were removed and their brains were injected with tracers and monitored as they gambled between two different options presented to them on two screens.
Test subjects were given a low-risk, low reward choice and a high-risk, high reward option, with the monkeys choosing risk over reward more than 70% of the time.
The study—funded under an NIH National Institute of Mental Health $1.9 million grant and an NIH National Institute of Drug Abuse $1.8 million grant—gambled that this monkey study was a good use of taxpayer funds.
When local concert venues and family-owned theaters were forced to shut down during the pandemic, distributing financial relief was left to the Small Business Administration (SBA). The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program was supposed to provide a lifeline to small entertainment businesses nationwide.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, SBA failed to deliver. Business Insider identified dozens of famous music artists and their touring companies that received over $200 million through the program.
So-called “small business owners,” such as Post Malone, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, and Smashing Pumpkins, received up to $10 million each. Even Nickelback received $2 million. While some may claim these funds were used to keep supporting staff, artists were not required to do so, and we have no way of determining how these blank checks were used.
These multi-millionaire musicians were cashing checks, instead of the intended recipients: America’s small businesses. Throughout the pandemic the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — an agency that suppressed its own involvement in funding dangerous coronavirus research — labeled any COVID dissent as misinformation.
NIH is now specifically targeting the COVID opinions of black and rural communities. A $3.8 million
University of Pennsylvania study is investigating “COVID-19 misinformation exposure on social media among Black and Rural communities” to help “identify and ombat misinformation.” In this study, researchers examine social media posts “with a specific lens on race” and location.
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.
Under Dr. Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was back in the business of wasting your money and torturing animals. This time, instead of tormenting puppies with ravenous sandflies, a Florida lab is trying to feminize male monkeys. That’s right, 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. After receiving the hormones, biopsies from the force-feminized, male monkeys were tested to see if they were more susceptible to HIV.
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.”
Critics note that monkeys themselves are not susceptible to HIV, and argue injecting the male monkeys with female hormones is unlikely to yield relevant information or to help humans. This year, the Biden Administration sent out a whopping $236 billion in inaccurate checks, otherwise known as “improper payments.” Federal law defines the term as payments made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason.
FY2023’s whoopsies were down only slightly from FY2022’s $247 billion in improper payments, which came to $675 million a day.
Illustration: Pixabay