Facts Matter – "9 Eye-Opening Examples of ‘Waste Spending’ From Rand Paul's $1.6 Trillion ‘Festivus’ Report"

Podcast: Facts Matter
Host: Roman (The Epoch Times)
Date: January 16, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode revolves around Senator Rand Paul's 2025 Festivus Report, which exposes what Paul describes as some of the most egregious examples of federal government waste in the past year. Host Roman walks listeners through nine remarkable cases pulled from the report, aiming to highlight a broad spectrum of questionable or controversial expenditures. The tone is one of incredulity and critical examination, with an invitation for listeners to decide whether these programs are wasteful or potentially beneficial investments.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Growth of 'Waste' Spending ([00:00])

Background: For 11 years, Senator Paul has been publishing the Festivus Report to “air grievances” over government expenditures.
Trend: The reported sum of wasted government spending has escalated dramatically:
- 2015: ~$1 billion
- 2019: >$50 billion
- 2025: $1.639 trillion
Interest Payments Dominate: "US taxpayers paid a cool $1.22 trillion in interest just to service the national debt last year. That is significantly more than the entire military budget." (Roman, [01:07])
While Senator Paul now includes interest payments in the total waste, the episode will focus on other, more specific examples.

1. NIH Beagle & Puppy Experiments ([02:10])

Continuation of Notorious Experiments: After public outcry over prior NIH beagle experiments, funding not only persisted but increased.
Details:
- $13.8 million spent on infesting beagle puppies with disease-carrying ticks at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
- Puppies denied pain relief to avoid interaction with vaccines.
- “This project alone is still funded by three different FAUCI ERA NIAID grants, which … have cost taxpayers over $13.8 million so far.” (Roman quoting the report, [03:25])

2. VA – Binge Drinking Ferrets ([04:20])

Department of Veterans Affairs Project: $1 million for experiments inducing alcoholism in teenage ferrets.
Method: Ferrets forced to drink only alcohol on designated "forced binge days," with the process repeated for up to 90 days before being euthanized.
Claimed Purpose: "The researchers claim the goal of this drunken ferret experiment is to pave the way for teenage ferrets to be used to test chemical weapons, opioids, extreme stress and TBI ... or to conduct studies related to depression, stress responses, addiction, schizophrenia, suicide and sensory processing." (Roman, quoting, [05:25])
Host's takeaway: "Hope those experiments pan out to something useful." (Roman, [06:30])

3. TikTok Influencer Anti-Drug Campaign ([06:40])

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS):
- $1.5 million for "UnitaE," a TikTok-based anti-drug initiative targeting Latinx communities.
- 30 celebrity influencers recruited to spread anti-drug messages in South Florida.
Questionable Effectiveness: "Taxpayers are footing the bill to see if celebrity clout and group chats can succeed where decades of anti-drug programs have failed." (Roman quoting the report, [07:40])
Roman's perspective: Spending to curb youth drug use is not the worst, but effectiveness is debatable.

4. US State Dept. – Pakistani Children’s Climate Change Cartoon ([08:13])

Grant Amount: $244,252 to create a TV cartoon series in Islamabad teaching children about climate change.
Critique: "American taxpayer dollars fund the creation of animated characters to raise environmental awareness and show youth practical actions to save the planet. It's climate policy meets Saturday morning TV, starring Uncle Sam as the executive producer." (Roman quoting, [08:50])

5. COVID-19 Vaccination Influencers – $40 Million, 2025 ([09:20])

HHS Campaigns in Minority Communities:
- $20.9 million to National Urban League – "Wellness Vaccination Coverage Program" (<10:01>)
- $20.9 million to Unidos US – "Esperanza [Hope for All] campaign" (<10:50>)
Efforts included mass influencer outreach, toolkits, and mobile events to promote COVID-19 vaccination.
Outcome Critique: "Taxpayers got charged nearly $42 million for the privilege of being lectured by celebrities and community committees that insisted vaccine hesitancy should be solved with more toolkits, flyers and talking points from the same institutions that caused the mistrust in the first place." (Roman, [11:10])
Actual impact on vaccine adoption unclear.

6. Inclusive Vegetable Gardens for Low-Income LGBTQ+ Communities ([12:10])

USDA Program: $141,000 to support “QT BIPOC”—queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of color—farmers in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Project Goal: "Co-design a resilient and equitable food system for low income QT BIPOC communities…” (Roman quoting, [12:40])
Scope includes “queer, trans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, intersex, gender non-conforming, non-binary, two spirit and basically anyone else they can fit under the umbrella.” (Roman, [12:57])

7. Northwestern University – Dismantling Systemic Racism ([13:20])

HHS/NIH Grant: $3.3 million to Northwestern University for its Nurture program.
Funded Projects:
- Safe Space Ambassadors
- Inclusive excellence coaching
- Institutional transformation and accountability committee
Critique: “Northwestern is one of the wealthiest universities in the country … yet taxpayers are picking up the tab for its internal HR experiments.” (Roman, [13:50])

8. Gender-Affirming Care Activism in Guatemala ([14:10])

USAID: $2 million approved for gender-affirming care activism and influencer campaigns by Association LAMDA in Guatemala.
Roman’s View:
- "This isn't disaster relief or clean water. It's social engineering abroad funded by people who never got a vote on it." ([15:07])
Highlighted as an example of foreign aid expenditures with questionable alignment to core U.S. interests.

9. Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Boondoggle ([15:45])

DOT Funding: $7.5 billion allocated in 2021 for 500,000 charging stations nationwide.
Actual Output by April 2025: Only 68 stations (384 charging ports in 16 states).
Calculation: "If you do the math, each charging station effectively cost the US taxpayers over $110 million a piece." (Roman, [16:53])
Political contention: Trump administration tried and failed to reallocate funding; federal court stepped in.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“US taxpayers paid a cool $1.22 trillion in interest just to service the national debt last year.” — Roman ([01:07])
"Do you think that this is wasteful spending or throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks in terms of investment?" — Roman ([18:08])
"Taxpayers got charged nearly $42 million for the privilege of being lectured by celebrities and community committees..." — Roman (on vaccine influencer campaigns, [11:10])
“Hope those experiments pan out to something useful.” — Roman (on $1 million for ferret binge-drinking studies, [06:30])
"...each charging station effectively cost the US taxpayers over $110 million a piece." — Roman ([16:53])

Listener Call-to-Action & Final Thoughts ([17:45])

Roman invites audience feedback: Should these line items be considered wasteful or are they valuable government investments?
A link to the full Festivus Report is mentioned for those interested in a more in-depth review.
Closing reflection on the scale of spending, especially in comparison to mounting interest payments on U.S. debt: "Ironically, we as a country are actually so much in debt that all these programs ... really don't even amount to a rounding error when you compare them to the interest payments..."

Summary Table of Examples (with Timestamps)

| Example | Spending | Purpose/Controversy | Timestamp | |------------------------------------------------|:-----------:|-------------------------------------------------------------|-------------| | NIH beagle puppy experiments | $13.8M | Infecting puppies with ticks, cruelty allegations | 03:25 | | VA binge-drinking ferrets | $1M | Alcoholism/mental health research on ferrets | 05:25 | | TikTok anti-drug influencer campaign | $1.5M | Celebrity campaigns for Latinx kids | 07:40 | | US climate change cartoon for Pakistani kids | $244K | Climate education in Islamabad | 08:50 | | Minority vaccine influencer campaigns | $40M+ | COVID-19 vax outreach via Urban League/Unidos US | 11:10 | | Inclusive vegetable gardens in NYC | $141K | QT BIPOC support in Brooklyn/Bronx | 12:40 | | Dismantling racism at Northwestern | $3.3M | “Safe Space Ambassadors” and HR initiatives | 13:50 | | Gender-affirming care activism in Guatemala | $2M | International gender and LGBT advocacy | 15:07 | | EV charger rollout failure | $7.5B | Only 68 charging stations produced | 16:53 |

Tone and Style

Throughout the episode, host Roman maintains a dry, matter-of-fact delivery, often laced with incredulity and rhetorical questioning but consistent with “no spin, no favorites” journalism.
Listeners are continually invited to question and decide for themselves, with the host balancing critique with open-ended skepticism: “But hey, maybe I’m missing something. Maybe these are all just great investments.” ([17:10])

Closing

The episode offers a rapid-fire audit of how federal dollars are sometimes spent in eye-opening (and at times surreal) ways, using Rand Paul's annual Festivus Report as a lens. While many line items provoke skepticism, the real challenge posed to listeners is where to draw the line between “waste” and “investment” in a nation with ever-growing debt.

Transcript

A (0:00)

For the past 11 years. Now, you had Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky release what he calls his annual Festivus Report to air out grievances. Now, that name is a reference to a Seinfeld episode, but the report itself is very much legitimate and it basically details what Senator Paul believes are some of the most egregious examples of the federal government wasting our tax dollars in the prior calendar year. And over the past 11 years, the dollar amount of the government waste that he cites in his reports has really grown significantly. Back in 2015, it was a little over a billion dollars. By 2019, it was over $50 billion. And the latest report, the one from 2025, was a cool $1.639 trillion. Now, it is worth mentioning that a huge portion of that actually comes from the interest payments on our national debt, which Senator Rand Paul now includes in his overall total. And just for your reference, US taxpayers paid a cool $1.22 trillion in interest just to service the national debt last year. That is significantly more than the entire military budget. And given the fact that that money really does go to nothing, literally nothing else other than the interest, there is a good case to be made to include it in the overall figure of wasted government spending. However, setting the interest payments aside today, let's go through the nine most interesting and I don't know, what would you call it? Eye opening examples of government waste from the latest 2025 report. And as always, if you appreciate content like this, please do smash those like and subscribe buttons so that the YouTube algorithm can pick up this episode and share it to ever more people. Now getting back to the report, let's start this way. You might remember how a few years ago, certain NIH experiments with beagles came to light. The cruelty of those experiments really made them front page news because they involved locking dogs heads into these mesh cages that were then filled with hundreds of infected sand flies. The screaming from the dogs was so intense that the researchers had to conduct something known as cordectomies on the dogs, which involved slashing their vocal cords just so that the researchers would not have to hear the dogs cry. Now, I myself and probably many other people assume that once these experiments came to light, they were ended. However, according to the most recent 2025 Festivus report, the NIH actually extended the funding for these beagle experiments, costing the taxpayers a cool $13.8 million quote. One research project that was funded during Fauci's 38 year tenure as the Director of the National Institutes of Allergy and infectious diseases involves infesting beagle puppies with hundreds of disease carrying ticks. In the FAUCI funded research at the University of Missouri, Columbia, puppies as young as four months old are exposed to ticks by having capsules full of the arachnids glued to their bare skin to infect the dogs with illnesses like rocky mouth and spotted fever. According to research records obtained by the watchdog White Coat Waste, dozens of the puppies are intentionally denied pain relief so that it does not interact with the infection or experimental vaccines. This project alone is still funded by three different FAUCI ERA NIAID grants, which which have cost taxpayers over $13.8 million so far. And then speaking of animals, the report goes on to state that the Department of Veterans affairs spent over $1 million on a separate set of experiments teaching teenage ferrets how to binge drink alcohol. Quote the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA apparently considers studying alcoholism in weasels to be so vital that they approved $1 million for a project to turn teenage ferrets into binge drinkers. In the study, researchers force ferrets to consume only alcohol for an entire day by withholding their access to water in what the experimenters call forced binge days. The other six days of the week, the animals are given alcohol and water and this cycle is to continue for up to 90 days when they finally kill the ferrets. The researchers claim the goal of this drunken ferret experiment is to pave the way for teenage ferrets to be used to test chemical weapons, opioids, extreme stress and tbi, which is traumatic brain injuries, or to conduct studies related to depression, stress responses, addiction, schizophrenia, suicide and sensory processing. Hope those experiments pan out to something useful. Moving along though, in another program, the federal government spent $1.5 million on a celebrity influencer strategy, mostly on TikTok, aimed at reducing drug use in Latinx communities. Quote the Department of Health and Human services spent over $1.5 million on a project called UnitaE and an innovative multi level strategy that claims it can reduce drug use in Latinx communities through celebrity influencer campaigns and friend groups. The plan involves recruiting 30 celebrity influencers, actors, singers and athletes to produce anti drug messages, then piping those messages through friendship networks. In South Florida, community health workers will map friend groups like they're in a teen drama movie, push influencer content through television, radio, streaming and gaming platforms and track the results. Taxpayers are footing the bill to see if celebrity clout and group chats can succeed where decades of anti drug programs have failed. Now I will mention that spending $1.5 million on an attempt to try and curb drug use in kids is probably not that bad of a line item, but this next one is a bit more ridiculous. The U.S. state Department spent a quarter million dollars to produce a cartoon for Pakistani kids in Pakistan teaching them about how to fight climate change. Quote the US Department of State awarded $244,252 to stand for Peace in Islamabad to produce a television cartoon series that teaches kids in Pakistan how to fight climate change. American taxpayer dollars fund the creation of animated characters to raise environmental awareness and show youth practical actions to save the planet. It's climate policy meets Saturday morning TV starring Uncle Sam as the executive producer. Moving along in another influencer related project, you have the Department of Health and Human Services spend a cool $40 million to pay influencers to tell their racial and ethnic minority audiences to get vaccinated for COVID 19. And again, this is not from 2021. This is from last year from 2025. And this $40 million number was actually split among several different projects. Quote HHS gave the National Urban League $20.9 million for its project Wellness Vaccination Coverage program. The plan was to build coalitions in 20 urban league communities, assemble a curated vaccine messaging toolkit, and turn barbershops, churches, mosques and community centers into pop up vaccination sites. They also attempted to categorize every resident's attitude toward COVID vaccinations on a scale, one of the qualifiers being those who are unsure and can be converted to adoption. And then the second tranche of that $40 million was given to another organization pushing the COVID 19 vaccine, but also pushing it towards minorities. QUOTE Unidos US was given $20.9 million for its Esperanza Hope for All campaign, a sprawling influencer and media operation designed to push federal vaccine narratives to Latino communities. Together, these grants created a coast to coast messaging machine where influencers, coalitions, mobile events, virtual town halls, and armies of trusted messengers repeated the same pandemic scripts that turned out to be misleading or overblown or outright inaccurate. Taxpayers got charged nearly $42 million for the privilege of being lectured by celebrities and community committees that insisted vaccine hesitancy should be solved with more toolkits, flyers and talking points from the same institutions that caused the mistrust in the first place. And as is the case with most of the programs on this list, it's very much unclear how much real world impact all of this had, meaning how many vaccine hesitant individuals were actually convinced to get the shot after hearing about it for the umpteenth time from a government funded influencer. Regardless though, moving along we have The USDA spending $141,000 to make vegetable gardens more inclusive for low income gay people of color in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Quote USDA's Community Food Project's competitive grant program is meant to do something simple help low income families access real food by funding projects like farmers markets, food distribution and community nutrition programs. Congress authorized it so communities could meet basic food needs, reduce food insecurity and support local farmers naturally. USDA spent $141517 to the Farm Training Collective NYC for a project built around QT BIPOC farmers. According to the proposal, the this initiative will co design a resilient and equitable food system for low income QT bipoc communities which they define as queer, trans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, intersex, gender, non conforming, non binary, two spirit and basically anyone else they can fit under the umbrella. Moving along, but sort of in a similar vein, you had the Department of Health and Human Services Award a $3.3 million grant to Northwestern University in order for them to install Safe Space Ambassadors and to dismantle systemic racism on campus. Quote the Department of Health and Human Services gave Northwestern University $3.3 million from NIH for a project called Nurture. The grant pays for scientific neighborhoods, safe Space ambassadors, inclusive excellence coaching, and an institutional transformation and accountability committee. Northwestern is one of the wealthiest universities in the country with an over $14 billion endowment, yet taxpayers are picking up the tab for its internal HR experiments, moving along in a separate project before it was shut down in the middle of last year, USAID spent roughly $2 million on gender affirming care activism and influencer campaigns in the country of Guatemala. Quote While Americans juggled bills, Washington is wiring money overseas so activists can underwrite sex changes and LGBT political advocacy In Guatemala, USAID awarded $2 million to association LAMDA for gender affirming care activism and influence campaigns. These USAID gender grants in Guatemala are a perfect example of how waste hides in plain sight programs dressed up as diplomacy that do nothing to advance America's interests. This isn't disaster relief or clean water. It's it's social engineering abroad funded by people who never got a vote on it. And while a lot of the spending that we've mentioned thus far is measured in millions, this next line item is measured in billions. Specifically, the Department of Transportation under the previous administration received $7.5 billion from Congress to fund electric vehicle charger stations across the whole country. But only 68 charging stations are currently up and running. Corporate at the behest of the Biden administration, Congress set aside $7.5 billion in 2021 to blanket America with electric vehicle chargers. Biden promised 500,000 of them. But by April 2025, the federal push had yielded only 384 public ports at 68 stations in 16 states, a network so faint you could miss it with your eyes open. President Trump rightfully attempted to freeze the frivolous funding and and redirect the funds to other infrastructure projects, but a federal judge forced the funding to be dispersed to this boondoggle. And just as a fun aside, by the way, if you do the math, each charging station effectively caused the US taxpayers over $110 million a piece. And so there you have it. Ironically, we as a country are actually so much in debt that all these programs and initiatives that we went through, they really don't even amount to a rounding error when you compare them to to the interest payments that we're currently making on our national debt. However, a question that I would have in this situation is if we're indeed so much in debt, can we afford to be spending a million dollars to get ferrets addicted to alcohol or spending $110 million to build a single electric vehicle charging station somewhere in one state? From my naive perspective, I mean, these types of line items should be seen as something that you buy when you are just flush with cash and with very low debt. But hey, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe these are all just great investments. Maybe, for instance, the ferret experiments with the alcohol, they will yield some kind of a scientific breakthrough that will bring in trillions of dollars in the very near future. So I don't know, let me know what you think in the comment section below. Do you think that this is wasteful spending or throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks in terms of investment? And if you want to read the entire Festivus report for yourself, I'll throw a link to it. You can find it down in the description box below. We only went through nine line items, but I think there's something I didn't count, but maybe like 25 line items in total. Pretty interesting to go through. Yeah, pretty interesting to see what the federal government thinks it's is worth spending your hard earned tax dollars on. Until next time, I'm your host Roman from the Epoch Times. Stay informed. Most importantly, stay.