Image credit to cover of Senator Rand Paul’s 2024 Festivus Report
U.S. Senator Rand Paul’s annual Festivus Report for 2024 released this week highlights a whopping $1.008 trillion in wasteful federal government spending, which is about $100 billion more than the approximate $900 billion in wasteful spending that Senator Paul identified in his 2023 Festivus Report.
Senator Paul’s comments in the introduction of his report:
Last Festivus, we bemoaned the national debt nearing $34 trillion. In just a year, Washington’s career politicians and bureaucrats have managed to push it beyond $36 trillion—unsurprisingly, with hardly a second thought.
Who’s to blame for our crushing national debt? Everybody. This year, members of both political parties in Congress voted for massive spending bills, filled with subsidies for underperforming industries, continued military aid to Ukraine, and controversial climate initiatives. As Congress spends to reward its favored pet projects, the American taxpayers are forced to pay through high prices and crippling interest rates.
The same big spenders teamed up, yet again, to continue sending Americans’ hard-earned money to foreign countries, funding endless wars, all while STILL ignoring our wide-open southern border.
And our mountain of debt will continue to pile even higher. The Congressional Budget Office predicts we will add an average of $2.1 trillion in debt annually for the next decade. According to a July House Budget Committee Report, the U.S. government will add over $6.4 billion of debt every single day for the next ten years…
This year, I am highlighting a whopping $1,008,313,329,626.12. That’s over $1 trillion in government waste, including things like ice-skating drag queens, a $12 Million Las Vegas pickleball complex, $4,840,082 on Ukrainian influencers, and more! No matter how much money the government has wasted, politicians keep demanding even more.
As always, taking the path to fiscal responsibility is often a lonely journey, but I’ve been fighting government waste like DOGE before DOGE was cool. And I will continue my fight against government waste this holiday season.
Senator Paul’s Festivus reports for 2024 and 2023, while identifying the wasteful spending on Ukraine, do not mention the reported theft of at least $400 million in U.S. government financial support for Ukraine by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his top aides as of April 2023. This was reported by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on his Substack page, “Trading with the Enemy,” April 12, 2023. From Mr. Hersh’s article:
“What also is unknown is that Zelensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least…
The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January (2023) in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.”
So, if Mr. Hersh’s report is accurate, the Biden administration’s CIA director, William Burns, was well aware of the magnitude of the corruption in Ukraine and even accepted its occurrence with Zelensky. Considering that Hersh’s report was published more than 20 months ago, one can only imagine the enormous level of financial corruption that has likely occurred with U.S. government financial support for Ukraine since then. And, considering that the U.S. Department of Defense has failed seven consecutive audits, the level of financial corruption associated with the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine since its war with Russia started in February 2022 may never be known.