For many years, Senator Rand Paul has published his annual “Festivus Report” on December 23, a fictional, humorous holiday imagined by the popular 1990’s television series Seinfeld on which celebrators share an “airing of grievances.”
For Paul, those grievances are the absolutely asinine things the federal government spends our tax dollars on.
And there are many.
As we inch closer to Donald Trump’s second term, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are set to lead a new commission, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which vows to radically cut government spending and waste, with Musk even eyeing $2 trillion in cuts.
Paul has said he’s been consulting “weekly” with DOGE using his “Festivus Report” as a place for the agency to start. When Paul, Musk, Ramaswamy and others banded together last week to kill the original, 1,500 page plus, pork-laden spending bill, backed by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, Paul called Johnson weak and even suggested that Musk could be a good replacement for him.
How much this fiscally conservative cast of characters might accomplish remains to be seen, but as Paul releases his 2024 edition of his “Festivus Report” today, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit.
Paul’s 41-page list of stupid spending includes items like the Department of the Interior spending $12 million on a Las Vegas pickleball complex and the State Department giving away $4,840,082 to Ukrainian influencers. Or take this item: “The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded a $2 million grant to study kids looking at Facebook ads about food.”
It gets dumber.
How about: “The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) spent $365,000 to promote circuses in city parks”; “the Department of State (DOS) spent $3 Million for ‘Girl-Centered Climate Action’ in Brazil”; and “the Department of State (DOS) allocated $32,596.12 for breakdancing.”
There’s more—plenty more—spending on things this absurd, but I’m not going to repeat the entire report here. You get the general picture.
What should be emphasized in Paul’s report is some of the spending that is no less wasteful, but far more a threat to Americans’ basic liberties.
The 2024 “Festivus Report” found that “The Department of State (DOS) wasted $330,000 to fund censorship of nonliberal and conservative media.”
This gets pretty sinister.
The report detailed,
Through the National Endowment for Democracy—a private foundation bankrolled by the State Department—and the Global Engagement Center, $330,000 of your money was handed over to the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). It’s bad enough the U.S. government is wasting your money, but now they’re using it to undermine your freedom—with the help of GDI, a British organization, no less! With your tax dollars, GDI cooked up a so-called ‘disinformation index’ to blacklist conservative and non-liberal media outlets, effectively making it tougher for them to secure advertising and compete in the marketplace of ideas.
The report continued, “These lists were then handed off to Xandr, an advertising firm owned by Microsoft. Xandr and other companies took the bait and refused to place ads on websites that GDI slapped with a ‘risky’ label, according to emails leaked to the Washington Examiner.”
“So, taxpayers footed the bill for an attack on free speech,” it noted. “Among the ten ‘riskiest’ outlets identified by GDI are The New York Post, American Spectator, Newsmax, The American Conservative, The Blaze, One America News, The Daily Wire, Reason, RealClearPolitics, and The Federalist.”
So we—the good folks at TAC—are basically on a blacklist.
“Their crime?” the report asked. “Not toeing the line of a particular political narrative. Meanwhile, left-leaning outlets like The New York Times, HuffPost, NPR, and BuzzFeed, were conveniently labeled as ‘less risky.”
Yes, this would definitely be a good place for Musk and company to start. (Not that we’re biased.)
Affronts to free speech were not the only threats to liberty that were taxpayers funded. The report found that “the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spent $2.24 million on COVID experiments,” and also that “Congress spent $15 million to turn the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) into an unconstitutional force to prepare, file, and audit your hard-earned money.”
This federal government is not only wasting our money; it’s being weaponized against us. At our expense.
Adding it up, Paul’s 2024 report highlights $1,008,313,329,626.12 dollars of waste—over a trillion—that could be cut immediately without a second thought.
Paul says in the report, “As always, taking the path to fiscal responsibility is often a lonely journey, but I’ve been fighting government waste like DOGE before DOGE was cool.”
With the knowledge of what’s in this report, and how offensive it is to our sensibilities and our wallets, Rand Paul and the Department of Government Efficiency should take chainsaw to this God-forsaken and untenable federal government, Javier Milei–style: Take no prisoners. Do America a favor.
Now that would be cool.
