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The worst ways D.C. screwed taxpayers in 2025

By:

by Frank Holmes, reporter

The holiday season is winding down, but Americans from coast to coast are still engaging in our nation’s best-known holiday tradition: gaining weight.

Unfortunately, the biggest pig of all is Washington’s pork-barrel spending.

For more than a decade, the annual snapshot of the Beltway politicians’ pig-out has been brought to you by Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky.

And his latest report paints the ugliest picture of all.

In 2022, Senator Paul found $482 billion in wasteful federal spending.

In 2023, the amount of your tax dollars wasted by Congress nearly doubled, to $900 billion.

Last year, that figure topped the massive $1 trillion mark.

But in his 2025 Festivus report, Senator Paul and his staffers document the highest level of useless, harmful, or meaningless federal spending.

“This year’s waste report tallies an UNBELIEVABLE $1,639,135,969,608,” noted Paul on the social media platform X.

Maybe the least appetizing detail of the report is this: While Americans were sitting down to Christmas turkey or goose, their elected officials spent their tax dollars trying to convince them to eat bugs.

Hard-working Americans paid $2.5 million for a campaign from the National Science Foundation to present insects as “food for humans.”

“It’s time to shut down taxpayer-funded bug buffets,” states. to the eleventh annual Festivus report.

But the Beltway wasn’t through taking food off your family’s table.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture plopped down $141,517 to create a ‘resilient and equitable’ local food network” to fund “culturally relevant food for low-income LGBT people of color from the Bronx and Brooklyn.” You were forced to work harder, so the USDA could “co-design” a “resilient and equitable food system” for “low-income QT BIPOC communities”—a politically correct acronym that stands for queer, transgender, black, indigenous, and people of color.

You had to fork over $22.6 billion for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to pay for immigrants’ mortgages, car payments, and even help them start their own businesses.

But at  least one American industry benefits: The State Department paid $1.5 million to promote Hollywood movies overseas—as if Tinseltown moguls, who donate heavily to the Democratic Party, cannot afford their own marketing teams!

HHS also spent $936,000 to help market to sexual subcultures in Los Angeles: the “bear/cub,” “drag queen,” and “queer punk rock” scenes about STD testing.

If they can find information on the “bear/cub” sexuality, can’t they locate their nearest testing site?

“This year, I’m spotlighting a jaw-dropping amount of government waste — the kind that makes you wonder if anyone in Washington has ever heard the word ‘priorities,'” said Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky and son of legendary libertarian Republican Ron Paul.

All wasteful spending hurts Americans financially, but some of the grants were downright deadly.

Joe Biden’s USDA spent a million taxpayer dollars “to soup up bird flu viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s parent organization and a researcher affiliated with WIV,” under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party.

If that weren’t enough, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) gave $54 million of your taxes to EcoHealth Alliance to collect and transport bat coronaviruses to Wuhan for gain-of-function experiments. As The Horn told you months ago, President Trump cut off federal funding to EcoHealth in 2020, but the Biden-Harris administration opened up funding for the organization, which funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

The Horn also told you about some of USAID’s most outrageous spending, which Paul also highlighted in his report, such as $2 million for transgender “care” and propaganda campaigns in Guatemala.

The report continues the senator’s “favorite holiday tradition of exposing the most egregious government waste you can feast your eyes on!” Many of the most stomach-churning grants involved twisted animal experiments, documented by the White Coat Waste Project, an organization that opposes anti-animal testing.

The War Department (then known as the Department of Defense) allotted $2,818,462 in grants to infuse the bone marrow, liver, and thymus tissue of aborted babies into mice.

Creepy much?

The government also spent $5.2 million to give dogs cocaine.

That and many other details of the Festivus report, named after the famous December 23 Seinfeld  holiday that begins with “the airing of the grievances,” prove that D.C. can’t get the pork-barrel spending monkey off its back.

The State Department spent $244,252 of your taxes on the “Cartoon Climate Crusaders” to draw up and distribute cartoons teaching Pakistani children to fight the ravages of climate change.

The government also spent more than $40 million to influence Hispanics and other minorities to get the COVID-19 injection.

“No matter how much taxpayer money Washington burns through, politicians can’t help but demand more. Fiscal responsibility may not be the most crowded road, but it’s one I’ve walked year after year — and this holiday season will be no different. So, before we get to the Feats of Strength, it’s time for my Airing of (Spending) Grievances,” said Senator Paul, who also chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

He pointed out one of our greatest forms of waste in our budget: paying $1.22 trillion in interest payments on the $38 trillion-plus national debt.

“We borrow over $272 million every hour,” said Paul. “We borrow $4.54 million every minute.” That’s $75,000 a second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

“Congress keeps shoveling money toward pet projects and special interests while hardworking Americans pay the price through inflation and crushing interest rates – even after President Trump took action to end most foreign aid programs,” says the report.

But Senator Paul said that while the Trump administration’s cuts to federal spending constitute “a good start, it’s just a drop in the bucket.”

Republican congressmen agreed there’s much more to do to deliver the promises of the 2024 Trump campaign.

“Our work has just begun,” Rep. Pat Fallon, a Texas Republican who sits on the House DOGE Subcommittee, told Fox Business Channel. Medicaid alone contains “hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“We’ve got to keep our eye on the prize, or it’ll just be another opportunity wasted,” concluded Fallon.

We couldn’t agree more. The Horn wrote last year, “Until DOGE and The Donald lay down the law, the spending will continue to rise and rise.”

At least now, they know where to cut—but then, they’ve known that for years. You can see our coverage of the 2024 and 2023 Festivus reports.

Until Congress tightens its belts, crooked politicians and their benefactors will continue to live high on the hog while Americans’ wallets get skinnier and skinnier.

About the Author

Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”