My Google-Fu has failed me in my search for links/sites that can detail some of the (surely) many governmental programs that are clearly obsolete and borderline ridiculous yet still funded due to lobbyists and political good will.
Can anyone point me in the right direction for some research?
I did find these… which if all true is pretty ridiculous.
Link here for cites.
#1 The U.S. government is spending $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
#2 The Obama administration plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars helping students from Indonesia get master’s degrees.
#3 If you can believe it, the U.S. government has spent $175,587 “to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior”.
#4 The U.S. government spent $200,000 on “a tattoo removal program” in Mission Hills, California.
#5 The federal government has shelled out $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their research on video games such as World of Warcraft. Wouldn’t we all love to have a “research job” like that?
#6 The Department of Health and Human Services plans to spend $500 million on a program that will, among other things, seek to solve the problem of 5-year-old children that “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom.
#7 Fannie Mae is about to ask the federal government for another $4.6 billion bailout, and it will almost certainly get it.
#8 The federal government once spent 30 million dollars on a program that was designed to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangos.
#9 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
#10 According to USA Today, 13 different government agencies “fund 209 different science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs — and 173 of those programs overlap with at least one other program.”
#11 A total of $615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.
#12 China lends us more money than any other foreign nation, but that didn’t stop our government from spending 17.8 million dollars on social and environmental programs for China.
#13 The U.S. government once spent 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.
#14 One professor at Stanford University was given $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love.
#15 The U.S. Postal Service spent $13,500 on a single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
#16 The National Science Foundation once spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians “gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions”.
#17 A total of $1.8 million was spent on a “museum of neon signs” in Las Vegas, Nevada.
#18 The federal government spends 25 billion dollars a year maintaining federal buildings that are either unused or totally vacant.
#19 U.S. farmers are given a total of $2 billion each year for not farming their land.
#20 The U.S. government handed one Tennessee library $5,000 for the purpose of hosting a series of video game parties.
#21 A few years ago the government spent $123,050 on a Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia. It turns out that Grafton only has a population of a little more than 5,000 people.
#22 One professor at Dartmouth University was given $137,530 to create a “recession-themed” video game entitled “Layoff”.
#23 According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. military spent “$998,798 shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas and $293,451 sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina to Florida”.
#24 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once shelled out $30,000 to a group of farmers to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host guests for overnight “haycations”.
#25 The National Institutes of Health paid researchers $400,000 to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.
#26 The National Institutes of Health also once spent $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
#27 The National Institutes of Health loves to spend our tax money on really bizarre things. The NIH once spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.
#28 According to the Washington Post, 1,271 different government organizations work on government programs related to counterterrorism and homeland security.
#29 The U.S. government spent $100,000 on a “Celebrity Chef Fruit Promotion Road Show in Indonesia”.
#30 The feds once gave Alaska Airlines $500,000 “to paint a Chinook salmon” on the side of a Boeing 737.
The Rural Electrification Administration was formed in 1935 to help spread the power grid to the rural farmers. That work is, IMHO, pretty much complete. (Wikipedia cites about 98% of farms had electric power by early 1970s)
In 1994 the REA was reorganized as the Rural Utilities Service and lives on in the Dept of Agriculture.
I’m only going to step in and point out the ignorance of items on that list that mock scientific research.
#3: legitimate neuroscience; this studies link between drug, brain, and behaviors using some convenient animal.
#5: legitimate sociology. Researchers are constantly testing human behavior in constrained situations and games. Why shouldn’t they take advantage of such a huge source of experimental data?
#9: Looks like legitimate agriculture/climate change research.
#14: Looks like legitimate sociology.
#16: Looks like legitimate political science.
#25-27: legitimate epidimiology which is directly aimed at studying and stopping the AIDS epidemic. This is trying to save lives. A lot of those statements are just ignorant refrains of “hur hur the gubmint pays for study of teh ghey.”
(For what it’s worth, y’all are going to pay something like $500,000 to fund my PhD, plus another six figures for all of the equipment and reagents I use in my research.)
#18 - It’s far cheaper to pay to maintain a building you may use than to let it get run down and have to pay to restore it to usable status. Yes, they could be sold and may be eventually, but, even then, it still makes sense to maintain them.
#19 - I assume this is referring to the Conservation Reserve Program which is not ‘pretty ridiculous’ in the least as it pays farmers to take environmentally sensitive land such as wetlands out of production. This helps maintain waterfowl and animal habitat.
Since you think it’s ‘pretty ridiculous’ I’m sure you would be happy to know that a lot of land is being taken out of CRP because of budget cuts or because it would be more profitable as crop land and is being tilled under to plant crops, especially corn.
The question is fundamentally political, since one person’s “clearly obsolete and borderline ridiculous” program is another person’s legitimate expenditure; the only difference is in the political or social stance of the commentator.
FWIW, this doesn’t really sound like it belongs in GQ, since there’s no way to formulate a definitive objective answer.
Your source doesn’t strike me as reliable.
They also facilitated the spread of phone lines and now broadband service out to rural America. Whether this was a great use of taxpayer money is certainly arguable (especially in hindsight with the spread of the cell network and satellite internet), but it’s not like they’ve just been sitting on their laurels.
ETA: I would very much agree with gnoitall summation of the issue-- virtually all these programs may sound ridiculous when taken out of context, but most of them seem at least somewhat reasonable when actually explained.
Does the government still keep telegraph lines?
Abandoned/unmaintained buildings can degrade surprisingly quickly. If no one is around to check if the roof/basement is leaking, mold and other similar nasties can render a building uninhabitable in fairly short order…
I’m not sure why there’s “scare quotes” around “tattoo removal program”, but I’ve heard of multiple initiatives like this done to encourage youth to leave gangs. Here’s one such program, and here’s another. Hardly frivolous in my opinion.
This thread reminds me of an old joke a friend used to make. It went like this “The people in [pick a city] complain so much that the government spends $[millions] just dealing with their crap!”
Of course, the $[millions] is the cost of their sewage treatment program so that the statement is technically true, but worded so as to give a false impression.
The OP seems to have found a list of 30 similar jokes.
So all these programs are legit and not wasteful? Look I will be the first to admit the link reeks of partisan politics, but if there is one thing I am sure about in politics, it’s that the truth is closer to the middle than either aisle. 
30 Stupid Things The Government Is Spending Money On(Google search)
Note what websites this is showing up on. Partisan politics, indeed.
I think that this subject is probably better suited for Great Debates.
for those people who would like to know the sources for the cited list are as follows:
and for some content:
Because the Italian government had dibs on the much cooler name “agroturismo” for the same concept. :mad:
IMO, many (if not most) are “legit and not wasteful”. To me it looks like #23, if true, is the only example of “waste”. The rest involve things where can be legitimate debate about how much the government should spend in such areas. But the list you posted isn’t making any attempt at legitimate debate.
For example, let’s take item #6: “Haw haw, half a billion to make kids sit still!” In reality that money is part of theRace To The Top program, a bill passed in 2009 where states compete for educational funding from the federal government. There’s absolutely no way that all of the money is about children who can’t sit still in the classroom. If there’s any nugget of truth to the claim, perhaps some small part of one of the state grants is indirectly related to the claim. Maybe there’s a sub-program aimed at improving early education by finding more engaging teaching method, so that kids pay attention and learn more effectively.
You want to argue that the federal government shouldn’t fund state education? Fine, just put forward an actual argument. Even among liberals who think programs like this might be good in principle, there’s plenty of room for debate about the details. For example, a lot of education activists don’t like the emphasis on standardized testing in Race To the Top.
Since item #23 looks like a good complaint, let’s investigate. Here is the original source the Heritage Foundation used when they listed it: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aY5OQ5xv9HR8
To provide an overview of the whole article:
So this is an example of bad government spending, yes, but as a result of fraud (a total of $20.5 million) against the government, with two people who have been fined and sent to jail. The fraud was detected by the government’s own auditors.
In addition, the government will recover some of the money eventually:
Thus, the actual cost to the government is not what the top-30 list would have readers believe.
13, 25, 26 and 27 are almost certainly HIV-related public health research. In case you hadn’t noticed, viruses are not good at following immigration law, and what started out as a small disease in an obscure part of the Congo rainforest has wreaked havoc on the world and is still a threat to the health a prosperity of American citizens. It has been a long process learning what actually works to prevent HIV. One of the harder lessons to embrace was the reality that in much of the world, sex workers are a major part of the epidemic, and that anti-HIV programming will need to target them specifically.
There is a great book called “The Wisdom of Whores” that goes into this in more detail. It’s actually been a hard sell to fund public health efforts that are actually effective, because so much of the messaging about HIV was focused on the idea that “it could happen to anyone.” Yes, it can happen to anyone. But if you are, say, in Vietnam, it’s much more likely to happen to sex workers, their clients, and their client’s partners. Funding programs to help prostitutes, though, is a tough sell, and for the longest time nobody wanted to do it. So we spent all kinds of money on HIV programs targeting the people least likely to contract HIV, people like photogenic kids and married couples. Dollar for the dollar, that money could have saved thousands more lives if it had been focused a little more aggressively on sex workers and injection drug workers.
It took a lot of advocacy by some very passionate public health workers to turn the tide, and we’ve finally started to embrace programs that are the most effective even if it does offend some people’s moral sensibility.
My guess would have been a program to help the chronically unemployed get hired. Yours sounds more likely.
If one side’s lying or “ahem” speaking politically, the truth isn’t going to be in the middle, or anywhere near that side. That list is cheap shot leopard calling, and nothing more.
I don’t know if #9 (cows and methane) refers to a newer study, but the studies being done in the 80’s and 90’s were really straight ag studies. See, you feed a cow, and the feedstock includes carbon. The higher the percentage of feedstock carbon that becomes cow carbon, the more economical the feeding program.
But in between the feedstock and the cow are the microorganisms in the cow’s digestive system. They are a fascinating, intercooperative consortium. Some crack celulose and lignin. Some shift the byproducts into acetic and other acids. Some shift the byproduct of byproducts into methane and carbon dioxide.
It doesn’t matter, to feed economy, what gets shifted into anything that the cow will eventually swallow and digest, and that includes most of the microorganisms. But carbon that gets shifted into methane or carbon dioxide gets eructed into the atmosphere and lost. It does not contribute to the formation of steaks and burgers. Those cows are burping feed dollars.
The point of the original research was to find ways to increase feed efficiency. Basic ag research. But researchers spend about 1/3 of their time writing grants to set up funding for next year’s work. When competative grants started to be offered for greenhouse gas topics, ag researchers jumped on that. And they had an advantage over researchers who were proposing to do completely new things. They had existing labs and proven procedures. They had years of past results. They were, so to speak, shovel ready.
And if we’re trying to decide if global warming is a danger, we need to know both how greenhouse gasses work and where they come from and how much is being produced where. Project #9 was a twofer. For one government grant, they got an ag result and an environmental result. That’s not a waste, that’s good grant economy.