Festivus is back! And with it, our most beloved Seinfeld-themed holiday traditions: Getting the pole from the crawl space, and Waste Warrior Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) annual skewering of wasteful government spending.

????Kudos to waste warrior Sen. @RandPaul on his #Festivus Report! His annual roadmap of reckless spending exposes

????????‍???? $36M to turn mice’s hair gray
???????? $1.5M to walk lizards on treadmills
???????????? $4.5M to spray drunk rats with bobcat pee

Is this how you want your $ spent?✂️???? https://t.co/EpnV7xzEUQ

— White Coat Waste Project (@WhiteCoatWaste) December 22, 2020

We always love working with Sen. Paul to find, expose, and defund waste—and The Festivus Report 2020 includes some truly egregious animal experiments that you were forced to pay for, and that belong on the chopping block.

Tis’ the season for the 2020 Festivus Report…..totaling over $54 billion in government waste. https://t.co/BU1CjiZdgS pic.twitter.com/5W2pOvPLUw

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 22, 2020

Let us air our grievances about absurd appropriations:

NSF gave away more than $1.5 million taxpayer dollars to put six lizards on treadmills. Screenshot from The Festivus Report 2020

$1,557,083 of your money wasted to walk six lizards on a treadmill!? (National Science Foundation) Fox News called out this item in particular in its story about the report, as did the Louisville Courier Journal.

$4,575,431 of your money wasted to get rats drunk then spray them with bobcat urine!? (National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs)

$36,831,620 of your money wasted to abuse mice and find out why stress makes their fur turn gray!? (NIH)

According to @RandPaul‘s annual wasteful gov’t spending report, taxpayers are still paying to run lizards on treadmills (at a cost of $1.6 million) I thought that was exposed years ago but maybe that was shrimp on treadmills. https://t.co/5Gtdt7pteV

— Susan Ferrechio (@susanferrechio) December 22, 2020

We’ve worked with Sen. Paul to highlight these abuses in previous Festivus Reports, too, and they show a strikingly bad pattern:

.@RandPaul has 99 problems and government spending is definitely one.

https://t.co/1DqxZSmCzs

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 23, 2020

In 2019, Sen. Paul ripped into the NIH for shipping $708,000 of your tax dollars to a UK lab to get zebrafish addicted to nicotine.

Smoking fish…Read more here: https://t.co/nGIE2601nC pic.twitter.com/RRTyeEisHr

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 23, 2019

2018’s report also aired some astonishingly wasteful and cruel animal experiments, including $75,691 the NSF threw away to blast lizards with high-powered leaf blowers and $874,503 spent by the NIH to study the sexual habits of quails on cocaine.

Here’s another one: Your tax dollars at work: “Sprayed alcoholic rats with bobcat urine (NIH and VA):$4,575,431.00.” https://t.co/5Gtdt7pteV

— Susan Ferrechio (@susanferrechio) December 23, 2020

Indeed, we wish we could say we’re surprised by any of this. But the government wastes $20 billion a year in taxpayer dollars on cruel, pointless animal experiments.

That’s your money, and a heck of a lot of it!, squandered to abuse animals in labs.

And to top it all off, in many cases those receiving your money are hiding that fact by violating federal transparency laws!

Those are just a FEW of the worst. There are many many more. And of course Congress ADDED dozens more examples in just one hellish Bill this week.

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 23, 2020

Upset? You’d better believe it! 

We’ve got a lot of problems with this spending…and, well, you know how this goes!

I’ve got a lot of problems with you people and now you’re gonna hear about them! #Festivus pic.twitter.com/hn5V6txXOk

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 23, 2020

Here’s the thing: We’re not just sitting around ho ho hoping 2021 brings us fewer taxpayer dollars frittered away to secretly abuse animals in labs.

We’re working our tails off with Sen. Paul and our other Waste Warriors in Congress to protect animals and taxpayers by stopping the government from throwing away your money, and putting a public price tag on all taxpayer-funded projects.

To that end: Sen. Paul, and Sens. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and James Lankford (R-OK), have introduced a WCW-backed billed called the Cost Openness and Spending Transparency (COST) Act (S. 807).

This bill was introduced after a troubling federal audit—prompted by a White Coat Waste Project investigation—found that federal agencies are not enforcing a law requiring taxpayer-funded animal experimenters and other grant recipients to publicly disclose how much they spend.

You shouldn’t have to wait until Festivus to find out who’s reached into your pocket and used what they took to abuse animals. It’s your money, and you have a right to know.

Thank you to Sen. Paul for your leadership on the COST Act and your impressive feats of strength in the war on waste.