Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum. Quorum Call Mr. President, we are currently $28 trillion in debt. Whose fault is it--Republicans? Democrats? The answer is yes, yes on both fronts. Both parties are responsible for the…
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
Quorum Call
Mr. President, we are currently $28 trillion in debt. Whose fault is it--Republicans? Democrats? The answer is yes, yes on both fronts. Both parties are responsible for the debt, and one side is honest about it. One side will tell you they don't give a fig about the debt: The debt be damned. We are for new monetary theories. Spend as much as you have got; borrow as much as you can; and somehow we are going to combat the influence of China by borrowing more money from China. It doesn't really seem to make a lot of sense, but that is where we are.
So we have before us a bill that will simply add to the debt. We will go further in debt. You might make the argument that we are actually less strong as a nation the more in debt we are.
Where is the opposition? Now, there is no opposition on one side of the
aisle, and on the other side, there is feigned opposition. The Republicans will feign opposition to the debt. They will say: Well, yes, we care about the debt, and the other side spends too much and borrows too much. You will hear Republicans throughout the land campaigning against the debt, only to come to Washington and vote for most of the debt. So what we end up with is a $28 trillion debt. We actually borrow more in a month than we used to borrow in a year. In March of this year, we borrowed $660 billion in 1 month.
The proposals for spending are alarming. We have spent and borrowed more in the last 2 years than we did during World War II. There are going to be repercussions of so much borrowing in such a short period of time. We are seeing a misallocation of capital throughout the economy. We are seeing a grossly inflated stock market. We are starting to see inflation throughout the supply chain throughout the economy. There are going to be repercussions.
The question we have to ask ourselves is, Are we willing to look at the example of countries like Venezuela or Zimbabwe that completely destroyed their currencies?
People say that couldn't happen in America. It largely hasn't happened because we have been the reserve currency of the world. We have been fortunate. People describe it as having the cleanest shirt in a closet full of dirty shirts. The dollar is weakened by such extravagant spending. Yet people still cling to the dollar because the other currencies are weaker. This bill simply adds more to the debt.
We say we are going to combat China through this bill, but we are going to combat China by increasing a Department of government--the National Science Foundation--that is actually, probably, one of the most wasteful Agencies in government. William Proxmire was a conservative Democrat from Wisconsin back in the sixties and seventies. He started an award called the Golden Fleece Award.
One of the first Golden Fleece Awards William Proxmire gave was an award for a study about what makes people fall in love. You would think, with the lampooning through the years of the ridiculous lizards on treadmills and of Panamanian frogs, that, after a while, people would say: Instead of giving more money to this Agency that is so full of waste and ridiculous studies, we should give it less money.
So, perhaps, if we wanted it to reform, we would say to the National Science Foundation: Instead of increasing your budget 68 percent, why don't we reduce your budget 10 percent and say behave better. What if we were to reform how they pick their committees?
For example, if you want to study cocaine and if you want to study Japanese quail using cocaine and if you want to know if they are more sexually promiscuous, do you know how you would get approval for your funding? You would call up your other buddies who study cocaine in animals and say: Hey, I have got this great, new study. Would you guys like to join in it and be my peer-review committee?
It is actually the ridiculous studies that we discover that are being voted on by people who are selected by the people who are doing the studies. What they do is they select other people with ridiculous studies, and they say: We will vote for yours if you will vote for mine.
So how do we get $500,000 spent in studying Panamanian frogs? They want to know whether or not the mating call of the country frogs in Panama is different than the mating call of the city frogs. Well, in coming from a rural State, I can tell you that the mating call of the country folk is always different than the mating call of the city folk. We could have polled the audience. Are quail more sexually promiscuous on cocaine? I think we could have polled the audience.
The thing is, there could be some reforms. For example, as much as I am opposed to government spending, there are some important diseases. Let's say Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes, heart disease. Why wouldn't we make the committees for the National Science Foundation have someone on there from one of the big five diseases? Why wouldn't we put a taxpayer advocate on there? Why wouldn't we have some sort of inspector general process so that this doesn't happen?
We have to review this. This isn't an academic point. We have now discovered that the NIH was funding the Wuhan lab. So we should have oversight on what happens, but after 50 years of abuse at the National Science Foundation, we are still studying will people eat ants to combat climate change. Seriously, that was a study. How many ants will people eat, and how many ants do you have to eat to reduce the global warming by 1 degree? It is a lot of ants.
The thing is, those are the kinds of studies that we are having coming out of here, and we don't make it any better by increasing their budgets. If you are a wasteful Agency and we give you more money, we will get more waste. If you want less waste--and this goes not only for this. It goes for the military. It goes for any other Agency of government. If you give any Agency more government money, you will get more waste. You won't get less.
The cocaine was actually the NIH, not the NSF. The NIH has got some of the same problems. One of the ones from the NIH, in recent years, was $2 million to see, if someone in the buffet line in front of you-- when you are going through the buffet or Luby's Cafeteria--sneezes on the food, are you more or less likely to eat the food? $2 million.
Now, look, if you want to come to me and say that we should study Alzheimer's disease, I have open ears--and on heart disease, diabetes-- but if you want to study whether if somebody sneezes on the food makes you more or less likely to eat the food, that is just ridiculous. The American people know it is ridiculous. If the American people could see what we are voting on, they would say: Oh, we are going to combat China by giving more money to the most wasteful Agency in the world.
Where is the money coming from? Is it out of a surplus? Can we go over to the Federal Reserve and open this big safe? Is there a big case of money? Is there a rainy day fund? Is there a savings account that we can tap into to say we are going to have government-funded research to combat China? No. We have to borrow the money from China.
Think of the irony. We borrow the money from China to put it into technology. We complain about Chinese socialism, which is the government running everything and spending all of the money. So what are we going to do? The same thing. We are going to borrow the money from China. Then we are going to have government-directed research, to which we will all say: Oh, socialism isn't good, but the government directed this.
Yet we are going to do the same thing, and we are going to be stronger than China.
This is a good example--and this is sort of a technical detail--of how the committee process works and how grant funding works. There was $700,000 allotted from the National Science Foundation for autism. Look, I know parents who have kids with autism, and I can be convinced that the Federal Government can be involved in some way, but the $700,000 that was allotted for autism was then taken and subcontracted to a bunch of eggheads who wanted to listen to a tape of Neil Armstrong on the Moon. If you are as old as I, you can remember being in school and seeing the crackly black-and-white pictures coming back from the Moon and hearing Neil Armstrong say: ``[O]ne small step for man, one giant leap for mankind''--or did he say: ``[O]ne small step for a man''?
A group of ``researchers''--and I use the term loosely--at the National Science Foundation got $700,000 of autism money to study one word, the preposition ``a.'' Did Neil Armstrong use the letter ``a'' or the word ``a'' or did he not? So they studied, and they were diligent. They listened to this 20-second clip over and over again. I think it took them a year of listening to this. They wrote reports and had findings. Do you know what their conclusion was in the end? It was, We just don't know. We just don't know. Was it ``[O]ne small step for man'' or ``[O]ne small step for a man''?
This is something you could fix before throwing and heaping more borrowed money on the National Science Foundation. Maybe we could say that you can't subcontract money that was meant for Alzheimer's to ridiculous research.
How would you stop it? Maybe you would have a committee that reviews the grants and that has someone on the committee from one of the big five diseases who actually says: Should we be spending the money on autism or should we spend the money on Neil Armstrong's statement on the Moon? Should we be spending it on this versus diabetes? You see, everything is a tradeoff.
Everybody comes to Washington. If you ask them--you know, the people who advocate for Alzheimer's or diabetes or cancer--``Are you getting enough money?'' and when I tell the autism parents that their money went to study Neil Armstrong, do you know what I get? I get dropped jaws and people going: You have got to be kidding me. My mother or father is dwindling away from Alzheimer's, and they spent money studying Neil Armstrong?
Did he say: ``[O]ne small step for man'' or ``[O]ne small step for a man''?
This is lizards on the treadmill.
Dr. Coburn was a Senator here for a long time, and he liked to talk about waste as I do. This was a decade ago--maybe more--that Senator Coburn was on the floor and would be talking about lizards on a treadmill. I think his was lizards underwater on a treadmill or--no. It was shrimp on a treadmill, I think. They have got lizards on treadmills, but they have got shrimp, and they have got crawfish on treadmills.
Think about it, really. We are a big, proud country, but we are $1 trillion in debt. Before we get to all of the extra stuff--before we get to all of the COVID bailouts--we are $1 trillion in debt just from the institutional expenses of the country. We bring in about $3 trillion in revenue, and we spend about $4 trillion. Of the money that we bring in, $3 trillion is a lot. We could spend that on a lot of good things, but we can't simply just say we are going to spend it on lizards on a treadmill and that somehow we have enough money to do that.
So of the expenses that we have, most of the money is consumed by Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, and the military, and then a variety of the welfare programs.
But that consumes $1 trillion more than comes in. So we have been meeting over the last year, just spending extra money beyond the trillion-dollar deficit. So we have a trillion-dollar deficit just from our ordinary expenses, and then we add to that, you know, a couple trillion here for COVID last year, a couple trillion more. We are going to do a couple trillion more for free college, free daycare, free this, free that, but it is not free. There is no such thing as a free lunch. There is nothing in this world that you will get for free. You will either have the future paying for it--our kids and our grandkids paying for it--or you will pay for it through inflation or you will pay for it through default.
And you can default in a dramatic way, through the destruction of a currency, or you can default in a gradual way through price inflation.
As it is, we are starting to see the price inflation take off. There are people concerned about inflation that is already in the stock market and where this goes from here.
But I don't think this bill makes us stronger. In fact, I think the Chinese sit back and, you know, hold their hand up and sort of titter and laugh at America thinking they are going to be stronger by borrowing more money from China.
So I just don't think it makes us any stronger at all. I think it makes us weaker, and it would be one thing if it weren't being so horribly wasted.
Lizards on a treadmill. So they get the lizard on a treadmill and then they have active x rays to look at its joints. They were curious as to why a lizard waddles. So if you have ever seen a lizard or an iguana when they walk funny, they waddle. So why do they waddle? You know, what do their joints look like in x rays?
And so we spent, you know, $1.5 million studying lizards on a treadmill.
One of the perennial problems in the Third World is the black market. We have it in our country. It is sort of a function of when taxes and regulation in the official economy become so onerous that you need to escape the official economy. That is what the black market is.
So a good example is New York City. The taxes on cigarettes are so high in New York City that you have a black market. In fact, the death of Eric Garner--the sad death of Eric Garner being choked to death in New York City had to do with taxes.
And some people were offended by this. They go: It was police brutality. Of course, it was, but it was police brutality based on exorbitant taxes that caused this man to be selling cigarettes--loose cigarettes in order to try to make a living. But that is what happens when government becomes so big.
So in parts of Africa, Uganda in particular, there is a big black market. And so God knows why or why in the world we are spending our money studying this, we decided to study gambling in Uganda. So we spent $30,000 studying gambling in Uganda.
Well, it turns out the black market develops because they don't have good title to their land, they don't have good rule of law, they don't have the things that have made our country great.
But instead of sort of exporting think tank ideas on how great capitalism is, we waste it through government grants studying why Ugandans gamble.
It kind of is reminiscent going back to the Wuhan lab. People say-- this is what Dr. Fauci has been saying. Dr. Fauci says: Well, who wouldn't want to study the SARS virus?
Well, yeah, we should. But, then again, why would we pay the Chinese to do it?
Well, there are all these viruses in China.
Well, are the Chinese destitute?
I think we are here because the Chinese are kicking our butt in trade, and everybody is worried about China so we are going to do all this stuff to combat China, and yet we send money to a Chinese lab.
Now, we recently voted to change that, but it has been going on for decades. In fact, Dr. Fauci, in committee the other day, said he still trusts the Chinese, the Chinese scientists.
He seems oblivious to the fact that perhaps there is a military influence in these labs and perhaps the scientists don't do anything without permission of the Chinese military; perhaps if there was a militarization of the virus going on--oblivious to that.
So there is a Space Camp in Alabama. My kids went to it one year. It is a great camp, and I am all for it. I, you know, would like to see more Americans go. If some American kids, you know, don't have the means, it would be nice if we could help American kids go to Space Camp.
But I am not so sure, you know, why we borrow money from China to send kids in Pakistan to Space Camp in Alabama or to Dollywood--you know, $250,000.
We also spent over a million dollars in Afghanistan doing an anti- drug program. Unfortunately, really, the drug problems in our country-- they grow it. They grow it like corn. It is a crop for them. The problem is the demand comes from us, but we spent a million dollars on public relations television programming in Afghanistan, and it was to convince the Afghanis not to use drugs. It was in English. So the vast majority of them couldn't understand or--you know, most of them don't have television sets anyway.
But this is the kind of thing that runs rampant throughout our government. So, you know, we talk about where would we find the resources to be a strong country again, to do the things that we could do to combat what happens in China. When we look at that, we say where could the money come from?
Well, we spend $50 billion a year in Afghanistan on the war. It has been going on 20 years. The war is 18 years past having any useful mission at all. The mission was over probably once the Taliban was defeated. There was still some mission for bin Laden, but it didn't really require necessarily troops on the ground and nation-building.
But we have been doing nation-building in Afghanistan. So our Nation crumbles, and we worry about China--you know, the threat of the ascendance of China--and yet, what are we doing? We are borrowing money from China to build roads in Afghanistan.
One of the things they did in Afghanistan years ago is they were going to build a natural gas gas station. This was to reduce the footprint of Afghanistan, the carbon footprint.
So this is the absurdities we sometimes go to with climate change. This is a country that cooks their food on
open fires often. This is a country with an average income of about $800. Most people do not have a car. So what did we decide to do for Afghanistan to reduce their carbon footprint? We decided to build a natural gas gas station
So the natural gas gas station was built. It was supposed to cost $800,000, but, you know, sometimes government is not that efficient so they had a few cost overruns--83--and it ended up costing $45 million.
So my question, as I heard about this natural gas gas station, was, How many Americans have a car that runs on natural gas? I think there are a handful of people who are really into it and have converted their cars into running on natural gas. There is a trucking company I am aware of. You know, it is not a bad idea, but it is a boneheaded, idiotic idea to build a gas station for natural gas vehicles in Afghanistan. They don't have cars, much less cars that run on natural gas, but we did it. We spent $45 million in Afghanistan on it.
So my staff was over there looking at the waste, and they said to the military: Can we go see the famous natural gas gas station? And as they--they wanted to go see it. The marine said: Well, it would take two helicopters full of 30 marines in each helicopter to take you to the gas station, so we were told it was too dangerous, and we didn't want to insist on something that was that dangerous.
So we spent $45 million on a gas station that we can't visit because it is too dangerous to serve up natural gas that nobody has a car that runs on natural gas. And my imagination goes to the gas station, and all I can imagine is sort of copper tubing sticking out of the ground, people running off with copper tubing.
We built major highways over there, but one of the biggest problems is no cars, but the other problem they have in Afghanistan is people put their camels in their tents, and so if you ever want a car to go up and down the road, you got to shoo the camels and the tents off the road.
We decided to build luxury hotels. See, this is part of our national defense. I think it was the Overseas Investment Bank, or whatever. We spent $90 million on a hotel in Kabul.
Well, we didn't quite get it finished. The contractor built about half the hotel. He built the shell of the hotel with no walls. I think he completed one room so he could send pictures home to say he was making progress. The hotel was never built. The guy ran off with, like, 60 million of the 90 million. The hotel still sits there, and guess what. It is a shell of a building. Our people are worried about the Taliban crawling up in it and shooting down into our Embassy.
So the next thing is--I am surprised it is not in this bill. It may be. Who knows what is in this bill. They need another 250 grand to destroy what is left of the hotel. The guy ran off with the money, and we have a shell of a building. It is a danger to our Embassy so we need to tear it down.
So, really, you know, we should have an amendment to put more money in this bill to tear down the hotel--the luxury hotel that we subsidized in Afghanistan.
The list goes on and on and on. The frustration of the American people is, Why does it never change?
William Proxmire was talking about this in 1972, studying why people fall in love. Why do people date? The government is doing dating apps studying why people are happy or unhappy, studying whether or not, if you take a selfie of yourself smiling and look at it later in the day, whether or not that will make you happy. Seriously.
Half a million here, a million there. Is there anything in this bill that will stop that from happening? So it has been happening for 50 years. You know, we didn't even authorize these things. They just go on and on. There is no oversight. You ask any questions, nobody wants to give you any answers, and it goes on and on.
Now, this isn't just one party. Both parties do it. Both parties are going to vote for this bill, but I guarantee, if you put up the different waste things that are going on in our government and you said that this is the Agency that is studying the mating call of the Panamanian frog, these are the Agencies studying whether someone sneezes on your food, you think the American people would be with you?
They are only with you because they don't know what you are doing today. They don't know that you are wasting more money; that you are shoveling good money after bad. They don't know that this is more of the same; that this has been going on for 50 years. And nobody, Republican or Democrat, is fixing the problem. We are just shoveling more money out the door.
We are destroying our country. We are destroying our currency. Right now, it is a little bit at a time. It is coming through inflation, but inflation is out there. It is lurking. People are talking about it.
But there is also another way you can destroy your country. If you look at the 20th century and you look at the decline in the stock market, most of it is in, like, 7 days. So those who think that we couldn't have a precipitous correction; that there couldn't be a precipitous correction, where all of a sudden everybody wakes up in the marketplace and says ``Oh, my goodness. The emperor has no clothes''-- we are $28 trillion in debt, and we have companies that have, you know, 200-to-1 price-to-earnings ratio. We have companies that are worth hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and yet what is their profit? Some of them don't make a profit.
Is there going to be a day where people wake up and say: ``Oh, my goodness, the stock market. The emperor has no clothes,'' and there is a massive selloff? I don't know.
But I do worry that the stock market is grossly inflated. I do worry, when we pass out $1,400 checks, which we did not have, we give them to everybody, and what do the young people do with their checks? Buy GameStop. So GameStop goes through the roof, makes no profit. It is a dying company, and it goes through the roof because everybody gets giddy on it because everybody has got all this free money.
There is no free money. Ultimately, the $1,400 we gave to people will be lost as wages don't keep up with inflation. It happens even as we speak.
Inflation has been low, but over the last decade, the dollar lost 17 percent of its purchasing power. Do you think everybody in America got a 17-percent gain?
See, this is sort of the difference between the seen and the unseen. Frederic Bastiat was a philosopher, parliamentarian in France in the 19th century, and he talked a lot about this. He wrote a book called ``The Law,'' and he talked about the seen and the unseen. It is also the intended and the unintended.
People--I call it the big heart, small brain syndrome of Washington. Everybody wants to help somebody. We have the same compassion. We want to help those out of work, but if you give people too much not to work, then they won't work.
If people don't work for a long period of time, they won't be hired again. This was illustrated when we extended unemployment to 99 weeks. It was done out of compassion, but as we extended unemployment to 99 weeks, what happened?
Anybody who stayed out of work 99 weeks and came in looking for a job, if there was another worker that had been out of work less, guess who got hired. Every study showed this.
So if an employer is faced with two employees, one has been out of work 10 weeks, one has been out of work 99 weeks, guess who gets hired. The one who has been out of work 10 weeks.
So when you institutionalize unemployment, when you pay people more from the government not to work than to work, you get a permanent class of unemployed, and there comes a point when they are unemployable. What does that do to the people? What does that do to a person?
I think our self-esteem is tied up in what we do for a living, and I think there is self-esteem in every job, from cleaning the floors, to designing a carpet, to creating the carpet, to laying bricks, to being a doctor or lawyer. Your self-esteem comes from being proud of your work. It comes from work. You cannot get self-esteem without work, and you can't be given self-esteem.
We have some newfangled ideas in school that we just give it. You know, Johnny can't spell, but we are going to pat him on the back and give him a
trophy because it will help his self-esteem. No. You have to earn self- esteem. But if we get a whole class of people who don't work, it is a problem--the lack of self-esteem, the worry and concern that come from this. The lack of what it takes to be a robust person is part of the problem with the sinking into despair and addiction that we have as a problem in our country.
This is another waste project that comes out of our State Department. We fund the State Department for diplomacy. I am for that. But we end up funding things in the State Department, and you wonder if they are useful for diplomacy or whether they are just pork barrel politics.
This is $850,000 that was given to a for-profit Afghan television station to support the development of a national cricket league. Really? So our State Department, which--you know, we have to pay Ambassadors. We have to pay Assistant Ambassadors. We have got to pay all the different personnel, those protecting the Ambassadors and our Embassies. We have to pay for Embassies, the electricity. All that stuff, we have to do. I am for that.
Where do we get the money to pay for cricket? Why is this the business of the U.S. Government? But here is the point: Does it ever get better? Does someone say ``My goodness. Someone stuck this little earmark in for the National Cricket League''? Does someone ever say ``Oh my goodness. We did this?'' and we reform the process and never do it again? No. We give them more money. Every year, every Agency in government gets more money.
If you think there is a waste problem in government and you want to fix it, it won't get better if you give people more money. You would have to give them less.
So what I would do is I would give everybody 99 percent of what they had last year--if it is a terrible Agency like the National Science Foundation, I might give them 50 percent of what they had last year-- and I would say to them: Prove to me that you are not going to do this again. They were studying dating back in 1972, and Proxmire lampooned them. Fifty years later, they are studying selfies. They haven't learned their lesson.
If you look at the process, they pick the people they want to approve their projects. You scratch my back; I will scratch yours. You do cocaine studies? Hey, me too. You approve my cocaine study; I will approve yours. That is what goes on at the National Science Foundation.
This one is kind of close to home. You may have seen it. We call it ``A Streetcar Named Waste.'' It is about a couple blocks from the Capitol over on H Street. It is a streetcar they spent millions of dollars on. For years, there was nobody on it, and for years, it didn't go anywhere. It was a streetcar to nowhere, basically. But we spent $1.6 million on this, and basically you could see it as basically a trolley car with nobody in it.
It was sort of this nostalgia. It is one thing to preserve something, but it is another thing to create some sort of thing that hasn't existed for 50 years and nobody rides. And that cost us $1.6 million, and often you will see it sitting vacant and not in use at all.
Now, we have decided that--I don't even know why they even think they need this anymore because I think climate alarmism has really penetrated all of our education. But just in case there is a child in the country who is not afraid that the oceans will rise and cover the land and that we are all going to drown and that the polar bears are going to drown, we need to make sure they know it through a special video game. So we spent half a million dollars on a video app to try to convince our kids that the polar bears are drowning sometime soon and that the end of the world is around the corner.
Will the Chair inform me how much time I have remaining?
I think at this point, I would reserve the remainder of my time.
Mr. President, I would reserve the remainder of my time.
Mr. President, a group of us chose to filibuster this bill because we think it wastes money. We think it gives money to one of the most wasteful Agencies in government, the National Science Foundation.
Since the early 1970s and since William Proxmire began giving the Golden Fleece Award, for 50 years, there has been a recurrence of waste from the National Science Foundation, from NIH, and from even the State Department. We discussed earlier some of these, and I have a handful more. I think the American people should know where their money is going to.
The NIH spent $2 million in research to see if using a hot tub can lower stress. Really? I think we probably could have just agreed to that, but no, we had to spend $2 million to study, if you are soaking in a hot tub, whether that helps to relieve your stress.
The NIH also spent about $1 million to see if they could help people overcome their fear of dentists. Really?
NIH spent almost $7 million of cancer research money to create an automatically flushing smart toilet. That is right--$7 million for an automatically flushing toilet. And here is the bonus: The toilet will actually take pictures of your derriere from the inside of the toilet bowl should you wish to have those for posterity. Seven million dollars for a smart toilet. How does this go on and nobody does anything? Do you know what we do? We flush more money down this smart toilet. We give them more money, and nobody bats an eye.
This is the problem of government. Nobody denies the waste. Nobody denies the ridiculous projects that are being funded. Yet, year in, year out, it continues.
We need to reform the process. We need to have a taxpayer advocate on the committee who votes on the projects. We need to have somebody with a grain of salt who is voting on these projects, somebody who says that studying whether humans will eat ants to curb global warming--whether that is a useful expenditure of $3 million, studying whether or not humans will eat enough ants to keep the globe from warming.
This goes on. The people at home are like: How could this happen? How could you spend money on this? But it happens year in, year out, because we never vote for less money. It is always more. So a group of Senators here today are filibustering this bill because somebody has to point out that the waste and abuse of money goes on.
The National Science Foundation--the king of wasteful spending--spent $100,000 to teach social scientists how to apply for grants. So it is not bad enough that we are just, you know, handing out money like it grows on trees, but we have to teach people how to get more of the free money.
There actually was another cache of money that went to Central American countries trying to teach them how to get more of our money. Really? We are actually teaching foreigners how to apply to get grant money from our government that is $28 trillion in the hole
We are annually $1 trillion in the hole, and the last couple of years, we are $3 to $4 trillion because of all these COVID bailouts and all of this crazy government run amok, and at the same time we are $2, $3 trillion in the hole a year, we are sending $100,000 to teach people how to get more grants.
The USAID spent $48 million helping disconnected Tunisian youth to not feel like they are a problem to society, to help them cope with modern society. Well, look, coping is not easy for young people anywhere around the world, but I guarantee that $48 million that we don't have, that we have to borrow from China to send to Tunisia, is not a good expenditure of money; probably helps no one; probably enriched some contractors somewhere; somebody steals some off the top. There is always a little skimming operation. It was once estimated that as much as half to 70 percent of foreign aid was skimmed off the top either by corrupt dictators in the countries receiving the money or simply by graft throughout the government that we send the money to. Often, the foreign aid money was going to countries with people who had dictators for 20, 30, 40 years, and we were giving money to dictators.
The National Science Foundation spent $4.6 million to study the connection between getting drunk and falling down. Now, you would think that would be obvious. You get drunk, you fall down. But, no, we had to go ahead and study whether getting drunk and falling down was something that happens. We spent $4 million on, if you get drunk, will you fall down? This is insane.
Not one person--a few of us but not a majority will stand up and say: Enough is enough. The NSF needs less money, not more.
The NIH spent $36 million to research why stress makes hair turn gray. I am at the age I need to know that one. I mean, why does stress make your hair turn gray? Really? Nobody would pay for this. If we got 100 assembled Americans and said ``Vote on whether or not you should spend $36 million studying why your hair turns gray,'' not one rational, commonsense American would vote for this. Yet this Congress is going to increase the budget of the National Science Foundation by 68 percent.
The National Science Foundation spent $2.5 million to research the effects of daydreaming. I am not kidding. You can't make this stuff up. So what are we going do? Increase their budget $29 billion in more money for the National Science Foundation. They ought to be ashamed.
One side of the aisle doesn't give a fig how much we are spending, but the other side of the aisle--the aisle that I reside on on the right--pretends to care about the debt, but the majority of them will vote for this monstrous bill.
The National Science Foundation used $1.5 million to study how to make tomatoes taste better. They spent a lot of money. They spent a lot of time. They wrote up their report. And this is shocking. This is groundbreaking research. They found that if you add sugar to tomatoes, they taste better.
You can't make this stuff up. But it goes on and on and on.
I am glad to be joined on the floor by the Senator from Utah. I will reserve the remainder of my time and pass the baton.