One of President Trump’s major mandates in the coming year is to cut wasteful government spending. Senator Rand Paul has provided a roadmap in the form of his annual Festivus Report, which details all the crazy, stupid, offensive, and un-American things long-suffering taxpayers are funding—to the tune of over one trillion dollars for the whole 2024 package!

I urge you to read the report yourself so that you can fully understand how out-of-control our government has become, but here are just a few of the highlights from 2024:

The Agency for International Development has budgeted $20,000,000 of your dollars to recreate Sesame Street in Iraq. The point, of course, is “inclusion” and “respect.” Yup. USAID is doing Muppet diplomacy.

The National Endowment for the Arts (“NEA”) gave $10,000 of your dollars to the Bearded Ladies Cabaret—a “queer cabaret arts organization”—to fund an ice-skating show about climate change. That’s one way to show you’re really serious about climate change.

Image (edited) by Grok AI.

The NEA has also given $385,000 for art displays in New York along the “High Line.” The High Line is a nice walking path suspended across a high-end part of New York. And now, thanks to your taxpayer dollars, the High Line will be even more high-end. Meanwhile, New York is drowning in feces, crazy people, criminals, and illegal aliens. But, come to think of it, those vices are things NYC has welcomed through its policies, so I can’t say that I really care.

The National Science Foundation spent $288,563 so bird watchers can have “affinity groups”—presumably places where trans, non-binary, biracial, yet still black lesbians can safely watch birds together. What started out as a hobby is now an expensive, taxpayer-funded boondoggle.

The State Department gave $66,830 of your dollars to fight “misinformation” in Bosnia. More accurately, that’s $66,830 in 2024. Since 2010, however, Bosnia has received a total of $253,363 of your money, all to fight “misinformation.” I can’t even...

The Department of Defense spent over $10,000,000 of your dollars to slice open male cats’ spinal cords to implant electrodes that fired electric shocks to give the cats erections before finally severing the spinal cord entirely. It used the same types of electric shocks to get the cats to defecate marbles planted in their rectums. Presumably, the purpose behind these ghastly experiments is to help troops suffering from spinal cord injuries, but this seems excessively weird, cruel, and expensive.

And then there’s the $7,026,689 of your dollars that our government has been handing out in the name of magic. I have to admit that I just picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the first time since it was published in America. It’s a freebie on Amazon Prime, and I was looking for something light. I’d forgotten what a delightful book it is—and how much better than the movies.

Having said that, I do not want to spend $388,863 on a podcast about magic, $250,000 on an exhibit about magic lanterns, $94,006 to study the old “Magic School Bus” show, or $6,293,820 for the DOD’s “Magic City Discovery Center.” None of that’s magic. It’s all just a scam.

The money mantra goes like this:

• We are most careful about price and quality when we are using our own money to buy things for ourselves.
• We are less careful about price and quality when we are using our own money to buy things for others.
• We aren’t careful at all about price and quality when we are using other people’s money to buy things for others.

I’ll add a fourth bullet point to that mantra:

• We are recklessly profligate with taxpayer money when we are politicians spending it on things that bring no benefit whatsoever to the taxpayers, but that can be used to buy votes.

Our government has become grotesque and needs to be reined in. DOGE: Go to work!