[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 91 (Tuesday, May 25, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3392-S3393]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Government Spending

  Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, about 50 years ago, William Proxmire rose in 
this esteemed body and told us about government waste. He called it the 
Golden Fleece Award. They were studying things like dating and love and 
what makes love, and we had these great scientific studies about love. 
These are William Proxmire's words from the early 1970s. He was a 
conservative Democrat.
  He says:

       I object to this [study on love] because no one--not even 
     the National Science Foundation--can argue that falling in 
     love is a science; not only because I'm sure that even if 
     they spend $84 million or $84 billion they wouldn't get an 
     answer that anyone would believe. I'm also against [this 
     study on love] because I don't want the answer.
       I believe that 200 million other Americans want to leave 
     some things in life a mystery, and right at the top of things 
     we don't [need] to know is why a man falls in love with a 
     woman and vice versa.

  Stirring words. The Golden Fleece Award--I remember as a kid 
everybody talked about it. It was in the newspapers. So what have we 
done to curb the wasteful appetite, the abuse of government that has 
happened at the National Science Foundation since 1972? Not a damn 
thing.
  Here is one of my other favorites from William Proxmire's days. The 
FAA was named for spending $57,000 on a study of the physical 
measurements of 432 airline stewardesses. These included the distance 
from knee to knee while sitting and the length of the buttocks. Fifty-
eight thousand dollars--this was your government money being put to 
good use.
  So fast forward, and we spend about $8 billion a year with the 
National Science Foundation. Is it getting any better? Are they doing a 
better job at overseeing their money? Well, I don't know. This bill is 
going to increase their funding by 68 percent. There is $29 billion in 
this bill for the National Science Foundation. So don't you think the 
American people deserve to know where their money is being spent?
  This was from their sister Agency, the NIH, but you know we can't get 
started without talking about it. This is over $800,000 to study 
whether or not Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. 
I am not making this up--$800,000 of taxpayer money to study whether 
Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine.
  Do you think we could have just polled the audience? Do you think we 
could have just said: What do you think? Because that is sort of the 
answer. The answer is yes. And yet your government spent 800 grand on 
that. And then when we pointed it out 5 years ago, did they do anything 
to reform it? No. They are here today to give the Agencies that are 
doing this research more money.
  Another one that I think is quite revealing is this study that is 
about Panamanian male frog calls. You have about half a million 
dollars, and they wanted to know whether or not the male mating call is 
different in the country than it is in the city.
  Now, coming from a rural State like Kentucky, I can tell you the male 
mating call is different in the country than it is in the city. But 
nobody in Kentucky wants a half a million dollars spent on a Panamanian 
frog's male mating call. This is not a good use of money.
  So if someone told you your government was spending this money, would 
you give them more? Would you give the Agency more if they were doing 
this or less? I think less.
  In looking at the National Science Foundation's spending, we also 
found that they spent $30,000 studying Ugandan gambling habits. Really? 
We are studying why people gamble in Uganda, why there is a black 
market in Uganda. Well, do you know what? I think we know the reason. 
When government oppresses business and regulates business to death, 
they go to the black market. If you make something illegal, you often 
get more of it. But we spent $30,000 traveling over to Uganda to study 
their gambling habits--utter waste of money. We should not reward these 
people with more money.

  We spent about half a million on a video game. This is an app for 
your phone. I know we all need things to do when we should be working 
or at school. This is an app for schoolchildren to teach them alarmism 
over climate change. So you can click on the app, and it will scare you 
to death that California is going to be underwater in 100 years--none 
of which is true, all of which is alarmism, and a half a million 
dollars spent by the government to alarm our schoolchildren is not a 
good idea.
  This next study points out a problem with funding, in general, in our 
government. You give funds for something that ostensibly might be a 
good cause. So a couple of years ago, they gave money for autism--
$700,000 for autism. And you think, well, autism, you know, even 
myself, as conservative as I am, I

[[Page S3393]]

can probably say, well, that is something we ought to study, autism. 
Well, they subcontracted 700 grand of it to a bunch of egghead 
researchers to watch Neil Armstrong's statement on the Moon. Do you 
remember the black-and-white photo? He is on the Moon, and he says, 
``[O]ne small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,'' or did he 
really say: One small step for a man?
  So these researchers took $700,000 to listen to that crackly old 
cassette recording and find out, did he say ``man'' or did he say ``a 
man''? So we studied the preposition ``a,'' and we spent 700 grand 
listening to the tape over and over and over again. And do you know 
what they determined? They just can't decide. They are unsure, but they 
did recommend more money to study the problem further.
  This is insulting to the American taxpayer. We should not be giving 
these people more money; we should be giving them dramatically less 
money.
  But it also points out one of the reforms that I have proposed for 
this Agency. One of the problems with the National Science Foundation 
is, if I want to do research on Japanese quail snorting cocaine, guess 
what, I can ask for the same people who are studying snorting cocaine 
in animals--I can ask them to be on my peer committee. I can choose the 
people on my peer committee. So if I want to study animals snorting 
cocaine, I pick other researchers who are studying animals snorting 
cocaine. Guess what. They tend to say yes. If they say yes, the 
scientist gets on the next peer Commission, and he says or she says yes 
for their snorting cocaine research.
  This is crazy. We should not let these so-called scientists pick who 
is on their committee. Not only that, I think we ought to have a 
taxpayer advocate. Could we not have just someone with a good dose of 
common sense who says we shouldn't take autism money, steal it, and 
spend it on a bunch of idiots listening to what Neil Armstrong said 
when he landed on the Moon? So that is part of the reform we should 
have.
  One of my other alltime favorites from the National Science 
Foundation--this kind of goes back to William Proxmire and love and 
happiness--they wanted to know if you take a selfie of yourself while 
smiling and you look at it later in the day, will that make you happy?
  Really? That is a half a million dollars. I don't think we need a 
scientist to say that that is BS and that government has got no 
business doing this kind of research. I don't even know how you could 
even call this research with a straight face. But it goes on year on, 
year on. We have been complaining about this since 1972, so you would 
think maybe we would have less of it. We are giving them more money. So 
we are now increasing their budget by 68 percent despite this kind of 
research.
  The last one I have is this. We spent $1.3 million on insect 
ranching. This is money that was sent to study whether or not we could 
put insects into animal feed. We spent another $3 million, though, 
wanting to know if humans would eat ants to prevent climate change.
  What will you do, America, to combat climate change? Will you eat 
ants to combat climate change? That was a study. This is not science. 
This is ridiculous in nature.
  Actually, I lied. I have got one more example. We spent $1.5 million 
studying lizards on a treadmill. So I know you have all been curious, 
when lizards walk and they kind of waddle and they have a funny walk, 
why do they walk that way? What is going on in their knee joints? What 
do their hip joints look like when they waddle across the lawn? 
Everybody wants to know that, but are you willing to spend $1.5 million 
of your taxpayer dollars to take x rays--live, real-time x rays--of a 
lizard walking on a treadmill? I tend to think, you know, maybe 
Alzheimer's research, maybe cancer research, maybe heart research. But 
spending good, hard cash on x rays of a lizard on a treadmill does not 
strike me as the most pressing concerns of government.
  I would argue that instead of increasing their money, we should be 
decreasing their money. We also need to have oversight on where our 
money is being spent. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence 
now that NIH money went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is a 
great deal of evidence at least suggesting that the pandemic may have 
started there. We don't know for certain. I am not saying that it did, 
but there is evidence now that suggests that it might have. No. 1, 
there is no animal host for COVID-19. We have not found--of the 
thousands of animals we tested in the wet market, none of them had 
COVID-19. When you take COVID-19 and you try to infect bats, which is 
where most coronaviruses come from, what do you discover You discover 
that COVID-19 is actually not very well infected in bats. The bats 
don't catch it very easily. It seems as if COVID-19 is most adaptive 
for humans. But if it came from animals, shouldn't there be an animal 
host that is readily infected by this?

  The other evidence we have in the last couple of days is confirmation 
that three individuals at the Wuhan Institute got sick in November of 
last year, sick enough to be in the hospital from a virus that was 
previously undisclosed. They worked in the Wuhan Institute. We are told 
this came from the wet market lab from exotic animals, but not one 
animal tested positive for the virus.
  We have an amendment we are hoping will be adopted by this body that 
says gain-of-function research, as defined by the NIH in 2014, will not 
be permitted in China. We will not fund it with American dollars.
  But it is like so much waste in government, I think there is no 
reason to be sending any money to China for research. They are a rich 
country. For goodness' sake, we are worried about them outcompeting us, 
stealing our intellectual property, and then we send them millions of 
dollars to do research. Why don't they spend their own money? Do we 
trust them enough? Are they open enough to tell us what is going on in 
the lab that we want to give them money?
  I think, without question, they have not shown this, and now we are 
finding out that people were sick in the lab in November.
  No more money should go to China for research on gain of function, 
which means increasing the virulence or pathogenicity or the 
transmissibility of COVID virus to humans. I urge this body to adopt my 
amendment, which says, from here on out, China doesn't get any money to 
create superviruses in a lab, and we should continue to investigate 
this because 3 million people have died worldwide. We have disrupted 
the entire world's economy over a virus. If it came from a lab, we need 
to know it, and it needs to be fully investigated.