At the end of 2023, the U.S. government had around $33.5 Trillion in debt, including both public debt (money the government gets from external sources) and intragovernmental debt (money the government owes itself). The amount of debt the U.S. government is in steadily increases every year, and much of that money is wasted. Government waste is the misuse, inefficiency, or unnecessary spending of public funds by government agencies or officials. Money is wasted in many ways such as excessive spending, poor planning, bureaucratic inefficiency, or even corruption.
Although the idea of government waste may sound boring, the government has spent millions on some pretty funny programs. These programs may have seemingly no reason to be occurring in the first place, are researching ideas that may not even be beneficial, or they may even be stopped before any benefits happen. This article outlines the worst (or best depending on how you see it) things the government has wasted money on.
The Cold War was a playground for governmental programs. Along with tension between America and the USSR, the race to space was also in play. The CIA decided to implement multiple programs in an effort to further technology and get a leg up on other nations. One way the CIA chose to do this was through training cats to carry out surveillance missions. The program Acoustic Kitty was an effort to get more information on the Soviet Union and other adversaries. The concept was to implant tiny listening devices and transmitters into the body of a cat, which would make it capable of recording and transmitting audio from its environment. This also included a microphone placed in the cat’s ear. Both the transmitter and microphone were linked to an antenna in the cat’s tail. The CIA actually trained the cats to carry out surveillance missions, with the goal of releasing them in strategic positions so they could “eavesdrop” on conversations and relay them back to their handlers via the implanted technology. The CIA ended up abandoning the program after the first cat was hit by a car shortly after being released. Some sources also point to cats not following instructions as a reason for the program’s end. $20 million was spent on training and implanting devices in cats, just for the program to end after the first test run.
Going back in time a few years, the program Project Pigeon started to explore the possibility of training animals to perform complex tasks, particularly for military use during WWII. The idea was to have pigeons “guide” bombs. The plan was to train pigeons to peck at a screen that displayed a target, which would then guide the missile toward the target. In the case there were two possible targets on the screen, it was noted that at least two of the birds would be in agreement and the third would be “punished for his minority opinion” to encourage it to steer towards the target preferred by the majority. The National Defense Research Committee saw the idea of using pigeons in glide bombs as very eccentric and impractical but still contributed $25,000 to the project. It ended mainly because of rudimentary technology. The scientist in charge of the project, B.F. Skinner, was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. The award’s aim is to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word “ignoble”.
Staying in the military, the Pentagon was criticized in 2017 for spending $28 million on licensing fees for the green camo pattern on Afghan National Army uniforms. The issue? Afghanistan is 98 percent desert, so the bright color would stand out. Picking a different color (one of the many others the government already has the right to and aren’t already used by American forces, for example), plus making alterations like replacing zippers for buttons, would save taxpayers between $68.6 million and $71.2 million over the course of a decade, according to a government report.
The government seems to have a pattern of spending money on programs involving animals. For example, for more than 20 years Northwestern University researchers received National Institutes of Health money to watch hamster fights. The project reportedly received more than $3 million over the course of the project and $306,000 in 2015 alone. Some of those experiments involved injecting hamsters with steroids, and then putting another hamster in the cage to see if the drugged rodents were more aggressive when protecting their territory. Others investigated whether becoming a “trained fighter” through two weeks of face-offs made the critters more aggressive. The experiments stopped after animal activists pressured the lab to cut the program. Hamsters aren’t the only rodents the government has built programs around, however. The National Institutes of Health not only funded fighting hamsters, they also funded a program to see if a mouse could ride a treadmill. The program ended up getting $2.5 million for the project, which was meant to better understand how animals exercise.
Human behaviors will always be a topic of discussion. Many people want to know why people tend to do the things they do, especially since humans tend to follow patterns without realizing. For example, the National Institutes of Health funded a $3 million study on why people hate Mondays. While it may be an interesting question, many taxpayers found it trivial and thought it was a waste of money. In the same pipeline, some government studies have put $2.4 million into researching the Kardashian’s popularity and their cultural relevance.
While the government may have a track record of spending money on seemingly pointless studies and programs, they have funded so many more helpful programs. For example, the government established the Social Security program during the great depression to help retirees, the National Park Service to preserve America’s beautiful land, the Affordable Care Act to significantly expand access to healthcare, and so many more. At the end of the day, the best way to let the government know how you think wasted funds could be more helpful is to participate. You can contact local representatives to share your views, see if your local government has Budget Planning or Advisory Committees (which community members are often invited to participate in), and stay informed on how the government is spending taxpayer money. Your voice matters and can make a difference in these governmental issues.
