Cocaine for moody rats and climate-focused drag show-on-ice top Rand Paul’s annual ‘Festivus’ list of outrageous government waste

The US government wasted more than $1 trillion on kooky frivolous projects this past year — including by using taxpayer money to turn rats into coke fiends, according to Sen. Rand Paul’s annual “Festivus Report.’’

The Kentucky Republican’s anti-waste probe — named in honor of the day before Christmas Eve holiday immortalized by TV’s classic “Seinfeld’’ — revealed the truly bizarre “pet projects’’ approved by “members of both political parties” in 2024.

One of the most mindboggling spending line items involved the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, which spent $419,470 on a study to “determine if lonely rats seek cocaine more than happy rats.” 

Paul’s report does not note if scientists were able to determine which rats went for the blow. 

Perhaps more disturbing is the more than $2 million in government grants given to Cornell University over the past two years to infect cats with COVID-19 — and then kill them when experiments on whether the felines can transmit the disease are done. 

“Since January 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID and the USDA have given Cornell University $2.24 million to study whether felines can contract and transmit COVID-19 … Not only is this a waste of over a million in taxpayer dollars, but the experiments have led to the suffering and death of over thirty cats,” the report states. 

Another questionable use of taxpayer money came from the National Endowment for the Arts, which awarded a $10,000 grant to ice-skating drag queens.

The Bearded Ladies Cabaret –  a self-described “queer cabaret arts organization” – won the dough in support of its climate change-themed ice-skating performances.

The so-called “Beards on Ice” show features “polar bears, drag queens, and a character dubbed ‘Nonbinary Parental Guardian Nature’” and hopes to bring climate awareness to anyone attending the performance, according to the report. 

The State Department also tossed a cool $3 million for “Girl-Centered Climate Action” in Brazil, the report said.

Under a section titled “Ghost Towns on the Government’s Dime,” Rand raged that the “federal government spent $10 billion on maintaining, leasing, and furnishing almost entirely empty buildings.”

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