Festivus came early this year, with Sen. Rand Paul dropping his annual Festivus Report 2019 before Monday’s Seinfeldian holiday.
Celebrated on December 23, Festivus – made popular by the ’90s sitcom – is marked by a Festivus dinner, an aluminum Festivus pole, an ‘airing of grievances’ and demonstrating ‘feats of strength.’
Paul’s been tweeting his grievances on the holiday since 2013, and has assembled a Festivus government spending report for the past five years, his office told DailyMail.com.
‘I got a lotta problems with federal spending, and now you’re gonna hear about it!’ wrote Paul, knocking off Frank Costanza’s line from Seinfeld’s Festivus episode, in his report this year.
Sen. Rand Paul celebrates Festivus, the December 23 holiday made popular by ‘Seinfeld.’ Since 2013 he’s been airing his grievances on Twitter, and for the past five years he’s come out with a Festivus report, detailing the worst wastes in government spending
This year’s Festivus report details more than $50 billion in wasteful government spending including to Republican Sen. Rand Paul
Festivus became popular thanks to the ’90s sitcom ‘Seinfeld,’ where the cast celebrated the holiday with dinner, an aluminum pole, with the airing of grievances and demonstrations of feats of strength
In total, Paul has grievances with how $50,463,462,292.35 was spent this year.
And explained that number represents the taxes of about 6.1 million Americans, representing 137 percent of the population of Paul’s state that he represents in the U.S. Senate – Kentucky.
The same amount of money, Paul wrote, could be used to pay for 100,000 miles of paved four-lane highways, which would wrap earth four times. It would also pay for seven months of medical care for all of the country’s veterans.
In the report, Paul liked to highlight the ridiculous.
One such example is a National Institutes of Health five-year study that gets Zebrafish hooked to nicotine. That will cost taxpayers a cool $708,466.58, the report said.
The Kentucky Republican highlighted another NIH study where $4,658,865 was spent over several years to study the connection between drinking alcohol and winding up in the emergency room.
He also knocked the National Science Foundation spending $466,991.68 studying the mating call of the male túngara frog of Panama.
Paul scoffed at a State Department decision to spend $84,375 on a statue of Bob Dylan for the U.S. embassy in Mozambique. He also didn’t care much for the State Department spending $100,000 to prop up the Pakistani film industry.
And the senator was not impressed that USAID spent $22 million – yes, million – on a project to bring Serbian cheese up to international standards. In the report, Paul pointed to the pre-existing 1.4 billion pound surplus of cheese in the U.S.
‘So American dairy farmers dealing with the realities of this situation might be cheesed off to learn their government worked to strengthen competition and the European cheese market – using their own tax dollars to boot!’ Paul complained.
He also complained that USAID has spent $20 million teaching the Lao language to Laotians.
Paul slapped the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which runs the Metro subway system in and around Washington, D.C.
He finds particularly aggrieving what WMATA’s inspector general dubbed ‘Operation Golden Potty.’
The inspector general of the agency that runs Washington’s Metro system dubbed this self-cleaning toilet at the Huntington station the ‘Golden Potty’ for costing taxpayers more than $500,000 – before it broke and disappeared
Sen. Rand Paul’s report details the long saga of trying to turn the old St. Elizabeths Hospital – a former mental institute – into the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security. The report notes that some of the old structures are ‘literally sinking into the ground’
The IG found that from 2003 to 2017, Metro spent approximately $500,000 maintaining one self-cleaning toilet at the Huntington Metro station that was ‘not user-friendly.’ The bill to taxpayers may not even be accurate as Metro lost the receipts several years the restroom was running.
Metro had deemed already existing restrooms at the station a security threat post-9/11 and purchased the ‘Golden Potty’ after that.
But in recent years it sat broken – from 2017 to 2019 – and now, according to the report, it’s disappeared.
In the report, Paul details the long saga of the U.S. government trying to turn St. Elizabeths Hospital, an abandoned mental institution, into the Department of Homeland Security headquarters – to the tune of $2,120,040,355.35.
The site includes a mix of new construction – while renovating a slew of old, historic buildings, located on a hillside in Washington. The new construction has become a boondoggle because ‘the slope onwhich they are building the site isunstable,’ while the report notes that some of the historic buildings’ foundations are ‘literally sinking into the ground.’