Tipsheet
Premium

You're Not Going to Like How Your Government Spent Your Money This Year

Jeff Charles
Jeff Charles  |  December 24, 2025 8:30 AM

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has released his annual Festivus Report for 2025, and as usual, it contains a lengthy list of ridiculous government expenditures that our lawmakers are sure to ignore.

This year’s Festivus Report is the eleventh since Paul began releasing them each year. The annual report outlines the extent to which the government squanders your money on ridiculous causes.

In this year’s report, the government has taken your hard-earned cash and funneled billions of dollars into questionable pet projects, including $10 billion to the Department of the Interior to maintain, lease, and furnish empty or underused federal buildings and $15 million for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to “splurge” on new office furniture even though most of its workforce operates remotely.

As the national debt inches ever so much closer to $40 trillion, Congress “keeps shoveling money toward pet projects and special interests while hardworking Americans pay the price through inflation and crushing interest rates,” according to Paul’s report.

The senator detailed “a jaw-dropping amount of government waste — the kind that makes you wonder if anyone in Washington has ever heard the word ‘priorities.’ A grand total of $1,639,135, 969, 608, which includes $1.22 trillion in interests payments on the debt.”

Here are some more ridiculous examples of how our intrepid government leaders are spending our money.

Take the “Coked-Up Canines Redux” project, where “the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) had paid $2 million for 6-mont-old beagle puppies to wear a jacket that would dose them with cocaine.”

They later extended the project to a total of $5.2 million because everyone loves cocaine-crazed puppies. By the way, they killed many of the beagle puppies used in this experiment.

There was also a VA study “to turn teenage ferrets into binge drinkers.” Researchers forced ferrets “to consume only alcohol for an entire day by withholding their access to water in what the experimenters call ‘forced binge days,” for up to three months before killing them.

That’s right, folks. The government took your money and used it to create alcoholic ferrets and canine coke addicts.

But wait! There’s more!

Our government doled out $77 million Navy dolphin and sea lion program. This means they took your money and used it in a failed effort to turn dolphins and sea lions into soldier to locate and mark underwater mines, lost equipment, and unauthorized divers or swimmers around ships and harbors.

By the way, these animals were subject to “sleep deprivation, forced to swallow seawater, and made to wear headphones with loid noises blasting.”

And they killed about 55 out of 146 dolphins since the program started.

Also, the government spent almost $2.5 million to the Center for Environmental Sustainability through Insect Farming and the Center for Insect Biomanufacturing and Innovation. And what do these groups do?

They are pushing insects as the next frontier in “food for humans.” $2.5 million to get Americans to eat zee bugs.

Of course, we can’t forget USAID’s $2 million “Grants for Guatemalan Gendere Bending,” which is used to promote “gender-affirming care, activism, and influence campaigns in Guatemala.”

Anyone who wants limited government should be infuriated by this report. In fact, I think a lot of people are. But so far, the federal government has done little to address the myriad of problems Paul has identified each year.

This is because they know they don’t have to. They can steal their cut from your paycheck and use it to enrich themselves and their cronies with impunity because they know they will never be held to account. The question is: How long will we continue to allow it?