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from the how-your-tax-dollars-are-spent dept.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chairman of the Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management (FSO) Subcommittee for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), continued his efforts to reform the big-spending status quo with the release of a Summer 2019 edition of The Waste Report.
Once again, Dr. Paul's Waste Report turns the spotlight on just some of the ways the federal government spends the American people's hard-earned money, with this edition including stories of building up Tunisia's political system and the Pakistani film industry, supporting "green growth" in Peru, teaching English and IT skills at madrassas, studying frog mating calls, making improper payments, and more.
The biggest seem to be:
Converted an abandoned mental hospital into DHS HQ (GSA and DHS) .......... $2,120,040,355.35
Paid out billions from Medicare in improper payments (CMS) ....................... $48,000,000,000
[Editor's Comment: The full 15-page report is found in a Scribd display on the given link.]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by catholocism on Friday September 06 2019, @10:02PM (20 children)
How is funding basic science wasteful again?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @10:24PM (6 children)
Indeed. For that matter, what is so wrong about building up Tunisia's political system? I guess I could see how there might be flaws in implementation but if this is about encouraging civilized debate over matters of public policy and promoting free and fair elections then I am all in favor of that. I am also in favor of encouraging the good folk of Pakistan to put their energies into making movies; I would much rather they focus on that than...ummm...some other things I could think of. Same with teaching English and IT skills at madrassas; I would much rather the kids are learning useful skills that they can use to get better jobs and contribute to the global economy rather than getting their heads filled with toxic ideologies. Also, what is so god awful wrong with supporting green growth? Honestly, the one that concerns me the most is the part about "improper payments"; I would really like some elaboration on that part.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @01:39AM
Well, maybe if Trump wasn't ruining the American reputation across the world.... No, actually little things like these are the small costs America pays to maintain its worldwide empire. But do feel free to object, and you'll have a fun time bitching again when such places go up in revolt and want nothing to do with the U.S. and become the next stronghold locations for whatever succeeds ISIS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @06:06PM (1 child)
"US tax dollars", motherfucker. not "world tax dollars".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @10:21PM
Yeah? And? Have never heard of buying goodwill abroad in order to have peace at home?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday September 08 2019, @10:55PM (1 child)
There are some who have this crazy notion that Muslims can't do democracy. Their main evidence for this belief is that when they try to do democracy, those democracies tend to get replaced by dictators or monarchs. What they don't mention is that when that happened, typically the reason for that was that the democracy was trying to carry out the will of their people but that will was inconvenient to western oil companies, and the dictator or monarch was a CIA asset.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Tuesday September 10 2019, @12:59AM
What's been our track record with building up other countries' political systems?
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Monday September 09 2019, @10:54PM
There's nothing wrong with this at all - but he needed some red herrings to pad out his list.
The list comes to $50 billion. $48 billion of which is dodgy medicare payments. Then you add $2 billion for converting a old hospital into something else. Now, you can't have a list with two items on it. So let's find more controversial stuff. To me, the fact that there are entries here that are for $100,000 is just boggling. The US Gov budget is $3.8 trillion dollars. If the third highest thing on your list of "We blew this much monies!!!" list is $51 million - as part of paying for research (Paid for Google Scholar searches in Hawaii (NSF, NOAA, USFS, DOI, NASA) …… $51,722,107) I'd say that's a pretty tip-top budget.
Stop talking about $500k spent on a research grant about frogs. Start talking about things like this "On September 28, 2018, Trump signed the Department of Defense appropriations bill. The approved 2019 Department of Defense discretionary budget is $686.1 billion. It has also been described as "$617 billion for the base budget and another $69 billion for war funding." [Source] [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by MostCynical on Friday September 06 2019, @10:27PM (3 children)
Easy points can be scored with "ordinary" people by mocking esoteric research topics.
"Who cares about frog calls?"
"What sort of weirdo studies frogs at all? Why aren't they researching something that matters?"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Friday September 06 2019, @10:40PM
Heaven forbid people found out how, say, Air Conditioning was invented.
"OMG you wasted all my money helping those gard dang furners?"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @01:40AM
Yep. And who needs a centralized database of climate change data and summarizations of all the evidence that's been done over the years, as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:09AM
Like investing in walls. Investigating the "millions" of illegal voters. And how much does all that military hardware cost? For what gain?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Sulla on Friday September 06 2019, @10:37PM (2 children)
In TFA the complaint is about spending at foreign schools when our own are doing so poorly.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:11AM (1 child)
But he doesn't want to fund those either!? And who was the prick with the same idea that wanted to abolish the dept. of energy?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @06:08PM
look, you dumb ass statist fuck, the Us government is not supposed to have 4 million depts involved in every facet of citizen life.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @11:54PM (2 children)
Rand Paul has frequently been critical of NSF as wasteful spending. I agree that basic science research isn't wasteful at all. However, there is a lot of waste in NSF grants.
NSF awards a lot of grants to universities to conduct research. There are direct costs like the salaries and fringe benefits for the personnel conducting research, purchasing or leasing the equipment needed for the research, travel to present research at conferences, and page charges for publishing results. Then there are indirect costs like paying staff to ensure regulatory compliance, accounting to manage the grant, and upkeep for the facilities where the research is conducted. All of this is legitimate overhead, and I have no problem with those things being paid for by grants. Rather than itemize the indirect costs, universities negotiate an indirect cost rate with the federal government. The indirect costs are sometimes known as facilities and administration (F&A) costs. They are calculated as a percentage of the (modified total) direct costs.
The problem is that these F&A cost percentages keep rising. The university I work at recently renegotiated the F&A rate from 53.5% to 55.5%. The F&A costs go beyond simply funding the actual overhead from doing the research. Looking at the university I work at [unl.edu], the F&A costs go toward uses like faculty start-up funds, bridge funding (support for faculty research in between grants), and developing future research projects. They also get distributed to the various colleges where the funds are used for a variety of purposes including supporting administrators who are expected to promote research within their academic unit.
Many of the items I mentioned, which come from the indirect costs of grants, aren't being used to cover the actual overhead of the research being conducted for that grant. They're used for other purposes at the university, so they don't represent the actual overhead of conducting the research for a particular grant. I particularly object to using the money to pay for administrators at the level of individual colleges. Universities have greatly expanded the size of their administrations and the growth of their salaries has greatly outpaced inflation.
The 55.5% F&A cost rate isn't abnormal for what I've seen from other similar universities. That means roughly a third of the money from NSF grants to universities goes to indirect costs, and a lot of the F&A costs have little to do with the actual research the grant is supposed to pay for. I have no problem with paying the actual overhead associated with conducting research, but F&A costs are exaggerated and universities use the money to pay for lots of things that have nothing to do with the actual grant.
Basic science isn't wasteful at all. But the grants are bloated because universities negotiate high rates for overhead costs, much of which seems to be an abuse.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:22AM (1 child)
As a scientist in this system, writing grants is a colossal waste of effort. Bullshitters reign supreme and some of them are good people too, I presume. If you don't get your funding then you are essentially ejected from a career in research. This is a tragic loss - those that excel at science often don't excel at talking shit and doing busywork. It's almost as if the grant system has become perfectly opposite what attracts people into science. It's a savage change of direction when you get into your 30s early 40s.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday September 08 2019, @03:37AM
It's even worse than that. Writing grant proposals corrupts scientists.
As a scientist you are supposed to be honest and point out any caveats, etc. But when you are writing grants, you have to make everything sound important and gloss over possible problems. Almost all calls for proposals ask for an impact statement. Now scientists have to pretend that every research project includes a plan to save the world.
The constant stream of press releases from research institutions has similar effects.
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:26AM (1 child)
As "species speech recognition", it's very valuable as a tool to assess the population health of a frog species in a given area: just switch on the microphones, turn on the frog's Siri or Alexa software and you don't need to catch all those frogs and tag them to have an idea of how many they are around.
Why frogs are important, you ask? Mosquito numbers are kept in check by frogs for example. And frogs are among the first to die when pollution of a riverways increases, so you have a cheap way to estimate the health of environment in certain areas.
Isn't science wonderful, in spite of dismissive idiotic ignoramuses, like certain Dr Pauls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @05:57PM
But... FROGS. Their MATING CALLS!. Duh!!!!
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday September 07 2019, @03:26AM
Depends what basic science is. And depends on whether you could do better with that funding of basic science - accoutability and opportunity cost rear their ugly heads even if you never stray from basic science considerations.
On the first point, several times I've heard the assertion that basic science, and the related "blue sky" science are all about generating research that will have application a long time from now, say 300 years later (something like how electricity research eventually led to the development of computers). So what does it mean to "have application"? Typically, they'll say something about monetary profit. Sure, we can see how applied science rapidly focuses on that sort of thing while basic science wouldn't.
But there are plenty of other applications that don't fall in the make-a-buck category. For example, if my math model shaves a few man-weeks of time off your lab's research efforts or computer time, that's concrete gain for someone, even gain that can be expressed to some degree monetarily since the funding can now go to other scientific efforts instead. It may even be huge, if we can determine that some research isn't going to be productive that otherwise would consume considerable resources (such as general relativity ruling out various sorts of anti-gravity approaches and physics in general ruling out perpetual motion machines).
Related to this is the unfounded assertion that past basic research has been driven solely by the long term potential gains not by near future applications. I've played this game numerous times where someone comes up with a discovery or field of study and I show how research in that has near future application. It's not necessarily going to make money for someone (though it's not rare that I find short term profitable ventures hiding in there, such as lightning rods in basic electricity research), but it does benefit us in the near future rather than merely in some vague far future where category theory is the key to some massively valuable invention or scheme in a way that we can't yet understand.
Now we start veering into the second problem, how to know that we're conducting useful research. Because we're not seeing a lot of people hopping into time machines from 300 years in the future to tell us which basic science turned out to be valuable.
So what's more likely to work? Fund basic research where the researchers can credibly articulate near future benefits and has a track record of delivering such in the past, even if they are esoteric and not monetizable on any timeframe under a human lifetime. Or fund basic research where we'll have to wait 300 years just to see if anything came of it. On the latter, it's not just that it's a gamble. It's a gamble that you'll never have any idea if it's remotely productive. My bet is on not.
The other huge rub here is opportunity cost. We have solid, near future evidence that this gets royally screwed up all the time. For example, there are a few space science examples of epic levels of waste. Take the International Space Station. For somewhere around $100 billion dollars (in say 2010 money), they managed to create a science platform with remarkable low background acceleration from the force of gravity (on the order of a millionth of a gee - true zero gee is impossible near Earth or the Sun due to tidal forces). It has great research capabilities. But these came at that $100 billion dollar price tag.
Here's an opportunity cost. One could get two or three near equivalent international space stations for the same price - just launch it on Delta IV Heavy rockets (the payloads are volume/fairing sized limited not mass limited), discontinuing the Space Shuttle. And drop the "international" from the name by removing Russia and the European Space Agency from the critical development path for these stations. If basic science is valuable, then surely the capability to do two to three times as much basic science is more valuable, right?
Or the station could be scaled down to Mir size (a 3 person Russian/Soviet space station) with a good portion of the research capabilities and a tenth the cost.
Similarly, with space probes we could launch a dozen near identical probes for about 3-6 times the cost of a single probe (R&D doesn't need to be redone for each probe), including launch and post-launch operations. Surely the additional science would be worth the higher price tag right?
There is this remarkably casual attitude concerning the funding of basic science research which should be peculiar given the insistence on the value of the research. How come it's valuable enough to throw vast sums of money at it, but not valuable enough to do any sort of simple due diligence to try to get more research for the money?
The ugly resolution to that dilemma is that basic science research isn't that valuable, it's just another pork program which is optimized for the delivery of pork not for productive and valuable research on any time scale.