According to US Senator Rand Paul, the United States wasted $900 billion in 2023 on a range of projects that highlight the government's ineptitude and wasteful expenditure.

In his annual Festivus Report, Paul described that "No matter how much money the government has already wasted, politicians keep demanding even more," while US taxpayers are compelled to pay the price for Congress' expenditures on favored companies and pet projects.

Paul detailed a $2.7 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant was sub-granted to Russian researchers who researched cats' capacity to walk on treadmills. Mississippi researchers also utilized NIH grants to study the effects of methamphetamine on monkey sleep patterns.

Furthermore, according to Paul, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spent $477,121 in taxpayer cash to examine the vulnerability of forcefully feminized monkeys to HIV.

According to Paul, the government not only squandered public money on such worthless studies but also demonstrated incompetence.

He described that COVID relief money was delivered to scammers who used images of Barbie dolls as identification, in addition to paying $38 million to dead individuals.

In total, the government issued $236 billion in improper funding.

He vowed that the path to "fiscal responsibility" is a lonely journey which he continues against the government. 

According to Paul, the US national debt would increase by an estimated $2 trillion each year for the next decade, amounting to more than $5 billion every day or $60,000 per second.