The New Waste Book is Out...

The new "waste book" is out. Came out in January actually. But with all the political drama going on, I forgot about it until just now. It lists all the silly stuff the government spends our tax dollars on here in America. This is the PDF file. It does not download directly to your computer.

Waste Book Pokemon Go

Some highlights:

NIH spent nearly $1 million to study the evolution of monkey drool and another $230,000 to determine if the color red makes female monkeys feel more romantic.

NSF is spending more than $40 million to investigate a made-up disease called “Fearbola,” a term for the hysteria spread over social media about Ebola.

Washington tried to wash away its role in Flint, Michigan’s unsafe drinking water crisis by simply opening the money spigot. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was alerted to the problem two years ago but chose to ignore it while it misspent funds on unnecessary and possibly illegal activities. The agency provided $570,000 for a Washington state lobbying campaign that may have broken state and federal laws and another $40,000 to develop a version of the Minecraft video game exclusively for the well-to-do Berkshires.

Six years after awarding more than $3 billion to build a high-speed passenger train in California, not a single track has been laid. Billions over budget and years behind schedule, the only thing high-speed about this train is how quickly it is chew chewing taxpayer dollars.

Likewise, while thousands of airline passengers missed flights this year due to delays caused by long waits in security lines, the Federal Aviation Administration spent more than $700,000 renovating a little-used airport in Illinois from which just 20 flights depart a week.

Instead of filling pot holes, DOT spent $35,000 to display a giant, glow-in-the-dark doobie in Denver to serve as a dubious reminder to pot-smoking motorists not to drive while stoned.

And that's just one page of 135 page report. Anyhow, I thought maybe some would be interested.

Thanks,
blend57

How can this $h!t go on yet our veterans can't be taken care of with GOLD star treatment.

Our federal government is beyond FUBAR.

Maybe the next 'experiment' will get it right, but I doubt it, humans and money will surely be involved.

a reply to: blend57

If I read this book it would make me more homicidal than usual.

a reply to: blend57

NSF is spending more than $40 million to investigate a made-up disease called “Fearbola,” a term for the hysteria spread over social media about Ebola.

Lessons learned about the outbreak of fear are useful to a gubment that promotes fear in the populace about every friggin thing.

Any plague is scary, but West Nile Virus, Bird Flu outbreaks didn't 'catch on' the way Ebola did.
Because Ebola was / is a real outbreak, is way more scary, (if it gets out of control) and they so far have successfully contained it.

Keeping fear alive is a favorite pastime of the Overlords, from Killer Bees to guns to Wars of "Terror", Islam, Russians, Lil Kim, and nuclear friggin armageddon.

Now go cringe in front of your screens and worry about stuff far far away that doesn't affect you one bit.

Hey, at least Trump told the bureaucracies to stop wasting time and money preparing for the Y2K bug today. Yep. They aren't going to spend time in their documentation on a computer glitch that was over and done with 17 years ago!

intrptr, AugustusMasonicus, ketsuko, & stosh64


I read through it all (I admit that I skimmed over a few pages) there are some really, really concerning things in there and some very weird research grants being given out. ( I did not become homicidal Augustus, so...)

The ones I saw that bothered me the most were:

The Losers Fund

Most modern candidates find the limits to be unrealistic to run a winning campaign. Even while deriding what he called the “corrupt campaign-finance system undermining American democracy,” Senator Bernie Sanders, who challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination, called the public financing system “a disaster.” Sanders, an avowed Socialist, rejected the public funding, saying “nobody can become president based on that system.”

In 2016, primary candidates were eligible for a maximum payment of $24 million from the campaign fund, but had to agree to limit total expenditures to less than $58 million.

The campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Sanders, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson all had budgets exceeding that cap. If a major party candidate chose to accept public funds in the general election in 2016, the total payment from FEC would have been $96 million.

Derided as welfare for politicians and the “loser’s fund,” this check off allows taxpayers to direct $3 from their federal tax bills to presidential candidates with little very chance of winning. 29 While that is a large sum, it is not close to enough to compete in a national contest that now costs $1 billion per candidate. In 2012, the campaigns of both Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney spent more than $1.1 billion.

The system has “come to be derided as the ‘loser’s fund,’” notes Marilyn Thompson, a 2016 fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.223 “No one wants to touch it,” she says. As a result, more than $300 million lay dormant in the fund and that amount could increase to $450 million before the next presidential election in 2020.

Quack Doctors

Hundreds of quack doctors that are barred from public health care programs for committing fraud and other unscrupulous behaviors are still being paid millions of dollars by the federal government. If kicked out of Medicare or Medicaid for cause, such as fraud, quality or conviction, health care providers are prohibited under federal law from participating in the programs in other states. Yet, barred providers are continuing to collect $3 million every year by Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), according to the Congressional Budget Office

“At least $79 million” was paid by Medicaid to 269 providers who are barred from the program, according to a review conducted by the news service Reuters. The analysis estimates “Medicaid payments to banned providers could easily reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars,” but notes the data to make such a calculation is incomplete.

Again, there are a couple more that I would say are a bit concerning such as the Spaceport to Nowhere and Unused Emailing Archiving Service.

Thanks to everyone for the thoughts and responses....

blend57