The Book of Wasteful Government Spending 2010

In case you’re filled with too much holiday cheer this Christmas season, the latest edition of Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook”, chronicling wasteful federal spending, is now available. The dollar amounts aren’t always shocking, but the blatant waste of taxpayers’ money is. The full report is below.


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Personally, I think there is much more waste out there than Senator Coburn is uncovering and would like to see this project expanded significantly.

Some highlights include:

• The city of Las Vegas has received a $5.2 million federal grant to build the Neon Boneyard Park and Museum, including $1.8 million in 2010. For over the last decade, Museum supporters have gathered and displayed over 150 old Las Vegas neon signs, such as the Golden Nugget and Silver Slipper casinos.
• The National Science Foundation provided more than $200,000 to study why political candidates make vague statements.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spends $175 million every year to maintain hundreds of buildings it does not use, including a pink, octagonal monkey house in Dayton, Ohio.
• In July, nearly half a million taxpayer dollars went to the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna, where wine tasting and castle tours were among the events planned for the conference participants.
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) took the term "cold case" to a new level in 2010. The agency spent over $20,000 in taxpayer money "to unravel the anonymity of a 2,500-year-old mummy."
• The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent nearly $442,340 million to study the number of male prostitutes in Vietnam and their social setting.
• The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded over $600,000 to the Minnesota Zoo to create a wolf "avatar" video game called "WolfQuest."
• A $700,000 federal grant paid for researchers to examine "greenhouse gas emission from organic dairies, which are cause by cow burps, among other things."

Rather than do without these precious and vital goodies, why don't we just borrow huge amounts of money from the communist Chinese and hope our children and grandchildren can figure out a way to pay it back?