Tag Archive for: Senator Rand Paul

Fake Students, Vacations for Random Koreans, and Fattening Up Eels: Rand Paul Exposes 8 Insane Ways the Feds Wasted Our Money in 2021

Yet again, taxpayers are footing the bill for some truly crazy expenditures.


Every holiday season, Senator Rand Paul honors the fictional Seinfeld holiday “Festivus,” an annual airing of grievances, with a report exposing how the federal government wastes taxpayers’ money. The libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican just released his latest report for 2021 and its findings are even worse than expected.

And that’s saying something.

Senator Paul’s office documents $52.6 billion in waste, which is equivalent to wasting the taxes of 3.43 million Americans! The full 43-page report covers far too many egregious examples of government waste to list in one article. But here are 8 of the most outlandish ways the federal government wasted our money according to this year’s report.

The federal government’s COVID-19 efforts were a scammer’s dream. The Paycheck Protection Program was meant to help struggling small businesses stay afloat during the pandemic, but it sent an astounding $4.29 billion to ineligible businesses or duplicate loans. It even sent $3.6 billion of that money to businesses explicitly on the Treasury Department’s “Do Not Pay” list—which includes known scammers—yet, it didn’t bother to check!

So, too, countless billions were lost to unemployment fraudsters during the expanded pandemic benefits system.

Apparently, the federal government gives out more than $9,000 in federal funding per student in Baltimore, Maryland. One school evidently decided to take advantage of this system, claiming $1.27 million in funding for 140 students who were not actually enrolled and whose “whereabouts were unknown.” According to the report, “A City of Baltimore investigation found some administrators were changing grades and padding enrollment with ‘ghost students’ who were not actually attending the school in order to get more funding.”

The federal government’s multi-trillion-dollar COVID-19 “stimulus” efforts flooded the coffers of state and local governments with more money than they knew what to do with. This resulted in many absurdly wasteful programs, like one in New York City where Mayor Bill de Blasio used federal taxpayer money to set up a “City Arts Corps” paying artists to create public art and “resurge the cultural scene.”

Senator Paul’s report documents billions wasted on jaw-droppingly dumb expenditures in Afghanistan. The US reportedly allowed foreign nations to use military aircraft for free at a total expense of $773 million and spent $549 million on planes that were later scrapped and sold for parts. The federal government also apparently wasted $2.4 billion on constructing buildings in Afghanistan that were left unused as well as $88 million invested in building irrigation systems for Afghan farmers—only 2.7 percent of which were later used properly.

There’s a hot debate in American politics about how much money the federal government should spend securing our southern border. Yet apparently we are already spending hundreds of millions on border security—in other countries.

“$250 million of your taxpayer dollars are going to building borders in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Oman,” the report notes. “While Americans may be divided on how to solve the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, we should all agree that using our taxpayer money to fix someone else’s border is not the best idea.”

Many Americans could use a vacation but can’t afford one right now. Well, rest assured that the federal government is using their tax money to send random South Koreans on climate change vacations.

“Partnering with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United States Embassy in Seoul is allocating up to a $150,000 grant to send ten Koreans aged 15-30 to Washington, D.C. for two weeks to learn about climate change activism,” the report notes.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reportedly gave $337,500 to a Canadian company to fatten up eels for human consumption in an effort to boost the… eel market?

“This is corporate welfare, driven by somebody at the FDA who must really like eating eel,” the report notes. “Someone should remind the FDA that there are other fish in the sea.”

At least the federal government is carefully stewarding our retirement money, right? Yeah, about that…

According to Senator Paul’s report, the Social Security Administration made “100,766 overpayments totaling nearly $4.2 billion that may not be fully recouped until 2049. Of this, the Administration completely deleted and could not account for over $1.2 billion due to an error in their system.”

Rest assured, this list is hardly exhaustive. The full depths of waste across trillions and trillions of dollars in federal expenditures can’t be captured by one report or one senator’s office. The above items and $52+ billion are just the tip of the iceberg, indicative examples that remind us how wildly irresponsible the government is with our money. But as Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously explained, that’s a feature of the government, not a bug.

Why? Friedman identified four ways money can be spent. We can spend our money on ourselves, in which case we have every incentive toward frugality and quality assurance. We can spend our money on someone else or someone else’s money on ourselves, like buying gifts or spending a gift card. In either scenario, some incentive toward frugality still exists.

Yet Friedman outlined a fourth scenario, wherein someone spends other people’s money on other people. In that scenario, there’s really no incentive at all to spend frugally or wisely. And that scenario perfectly describes most government programs.

The takeaway here is clear. There’s only one way to get the government to waste less of our money, and that’s to give them a lot less of it in the first place.

WATCHRand Paul: What’s REALLY Behind Disastrous Inflation? (Interview)

COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Rand Paul to Blinken: ‘You’ve Created Hundreds or Thousands of New Potential Terrorists’ [Video]

My latest in PJ Media:

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a contentious exchange Tuesday during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Biden’s handlers’ catastrophic bungling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and continued incompetence. Paul took the opportunity to tell Blinken some home truths, truths that Blinken and his colleagues are certain to continue to ignore, to their peril and ours.

Paul hit Biden’s handlers’ “colossal incompetence” in Afghanistan, and noted that the Biden administration was “holding no one accountable, having everyone circle the wagons.” He added: “To add insult to injury, this week you’ve now released sixty-four million dollars in aid to Afghanistan. Don’t we have some prohibition against giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Now the argument from the Biden administration is, ‘Oh, we’re giving it to charities, and it’s for the good of the people, for poor people, and for women.’ Well, the Taliban has a history of taking this. Throughout their governance, they would take the money. This was a big complaint we had when they were in power the last time. They now have eighty billion dollars’ worth of weapons. Three-hundred and fifty thousand automatic weapons. Are we really naïve enough to believe that we are just going to keep sending charity to Afghanistan and they’re not going to interrupt it? I think that’s a foolish notion.”

Paul made Blinken even more uncomfortable when he asked him: “The guy the Biden administration droned, was he an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?”

Blinken first tried to deflect the question: “Uh, er, the administration is of course reviewing, that, uh, that strike, uh, and I’m sure that a, you know, a full assessment will be forthcoming .” Paul interrupted: “So you don’t know if it was an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?” Blinken continued: “Uh, I can’t speak to that, and I can’t speak to that in this setting in any event.” Paul shot back: “So you don’t know or won’t tell us.” Blinken responded: “Uh, I don’t, I don’t know because we’re, we’re reviewing it.”

Paul then moved in for the kill: “Well, see, you’d think you’d kind of know before you off somebody with a predator drone whether he’s an aid worker or he’s an ISIS-K – you see, the thing is, this isn’t just you. It’s been going on for administration after administration. The Obama administration droned hundreds and hundreds of people. And the thing is, there is blowback to that. I mean, I don’t know if it’s true, but I see these pictures of these beautiful children that were killed in the attack. If that’s true and not propaganda, if that’s true, guess what? Maybe you’ve created hundreds or thousands of new potential terrorists from bombing the wrong people. So you’ve gotta know who you’re – we can’t sort of have an investigation after we kill people, we have an investigation before we kill people.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Senator Rand Paul, ‘Republicans need to be boldly for what we are for!’

Senator Rand Paul (R-TN) delivered a speech in Sarasota, FL on Valentines Day 2015. He asked the gathered members of the Republican Party of Sarasota County (RPOS), “is anyone here a Democrat light?” Watch the response. Senator Paul calls those in Washington, D.C. the “non-productive sector.” He attacks Islam for its blasphemy laws. “Can we project power from bankruptcy court?” asked Senator Paul.

Senator Paul said, “Republicans need to be boldly for what we are for and boldly go where we have not gone before.”

Senator Paul was introduced by Joe Gruters, Vice-Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida and Chairman of RPOS. Senator Paul was presented with the RPOS 2014 Republican of the year award.

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