On Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” that government spending is out of control on both sides of the political aisle.
Discussing his 2024 “Festivus” Report on government waste, Paul said, “You know, I have a lot of problems with big spenders in both parties. And here’s the thing. Everywhere you look, you find more of this stuff. A trillion dollars, that means we found a lot of waste. But it’s everywhere, it’s in all the big departments, in the Department of State, it’s in NIH, it’s in the National Science Foundation. And people wonder, why does it exist every year? We have this department of DOGE, will they be able to get rid of it? Well, the only way to get rid of it is to spend less money.”
He continued, “So if you give the National Science Foundation $4 billion one year, and then you increase it to $8 billion, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that you’re going to get more waste, not less. This has been going on since the 70s, but it has exploded. But you have to be willing to cut spending for the overall department. NIH will have more waste if you give them more money. ”
Paul added, “They spent $3 million studying what kids do when they look at ads for food on Facebook. They had a whole bunch of kids look at ads for food on Facebook and that was $3 million. I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars to drill holes in a cat’s head, spin them around rapidly and study motion sickness, sounds more like animal cruelty than it actually sounds like an experiment. But the list goes on and on.”
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