As Lankford explained:

“This is the way the federal government has dropped the ball, and what we are trying to focus in on, is not trying to pick on one particular agency or entity, but to say we have got to be able to pay attention. We are really dealing with four different main areas as we walk through this; grants that need oversight, regulations and regulators that need oversight, agency bureaucracy and inefficiency, and then a lack of coordination between agencies.

 

“We are not just trying to raise the problem; we are also trying to raise how you solve it. Whether it is an administration action, whether it is a piece of legislation, whether it is just coordination between the two, or some of those things that have already happened, but we haven’t engaged in it enough to provide the oversight needed to actually get the coordination. Every single one of these identify here is the problem, here is the issue, and here is how to solve it.

 

“This is not a comprehensive book; this is not trying to list everything in the federal government where there is an issue. We are trying to find some key areas that we can identify, and say here are some problems we have seen, and some things that we find as common ground solutions. This builds on last year’s book.

 

“We have got duplication issues. We have got problems that are around federal foreign aid, which has been an ongoing issue that we have made recommendations on. When we deal with foreign aid, we should simply deal with foreign aid that is to the benefit of the United States. We don’t think that is an unreasonable request. Instead, at times, we deal with foreign aid, like studying fish bones in Tanzania.”

Some of the worst  programs (or best depending on your perspective) include:

  • In 2016, the Fish and Wildlife Service paid an $180,000 grant for the development of a method to count and tag the sea duck population in America. Only our government could commission a study to count ducks, “one little ducky, two little duckies…)
  • The National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum Services spent $495,000 to fund a temporary exhibit for sights, sounds, tastes and yes, even smells of the Medieval period. They must have gotten the idea for this from a Monty Python sketch (“bring out your dead!”)
  • The National Institutes of Health funded a $2 million, multi-year study about kids’ eating emotions, and how they don’t like to eat food that’s been sneezed on. Thank God our children aren’t idiots, they don’t like mucus-lined food (they don’t like the Michele Obama school lunches either).
  • The General Services Administration, in decorating a Los Angeles Courthouse, awarded a $ 1 million contract for a photograph of a Yosemite waterfall to be cut up in six pieces and displayed on different floors. I would have done it for $50 dollars.
  • The Transportation Security Administration spent $47,000 to create an app to tell passengers whether to enter the left or right line.  Another waste of money, just follow the line I went on and go on the other one.
  • The NSF spent $200,000 to study “fish bone and ceramic fragments from a selection of households representing diverse levels of social standing to understand how the consumption of food “reveals the social interactions and constructions of meaning associated with past daily practices that formed the fabric of a society” in Tanzania 500 years ago. This one is too stupid to make fun of.
  • The USDA gave $250,000 to Sunsweet, a privately owned cooperative which has revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually, to help them to market a new prune supplement. This one makes me sick to my stomach (so do prunes).
  • The Department of Justice gave over 300 million in grants to sanctuary cities to help them fight crime. Of course one way to fight the crime would be not grant sanctuary to illegal immigrants, er.. criminally trespassing aliens.
  • Obama’s $1.7 Billion in “ransom” payments to Iran. (Yeah I know Obama crosses his heart, pinky swears that it wasn’t ransom–he said the same about keeping your doctors with Obamacare).

Those are just some of the stupid government tricks exposed by Lankford in his federal fumbles report which you can read below.  Try not to have food in your mouth when you read it because you will be spitting mad!

Federal Fumbles 2016 by Jeff Dunetz on Scribd