As Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza famously proclaimed, “It’s a Festivus for the rest of us!”  The fictitious holiday popularized by the TV show entails staring longingly at the tinsel-free Festivus pole and, most importantly, airing grievances.

And, once again, Senator Rand Paul’s now-famous annual Festivus report airs his grievances about wasteful taxpayer-funded animal tests uncovered by White Coat Waste Project (WCW).

In the newest installment, Sen. Paul calls out the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for—as WCW first exposed—shipping over $770,000 in taxpayers’ money to the Kremlin-run Pavlov Institute of Physiology, where dozens of healthy cats had their brains damaged, electrodes implanted into their spines, and were forced to walk on treadmills before being killed.

Earlier this year, after a year-long WCW campaign, Uncle Sam cut off funding for these cat experiments and all other Russian animal labs!

This year’s Festivus report also criticizes the NIH’s wasteful spending for another boondoggle first uncovered by WCW: Fauci’s Monkey Island.  Located off the coast of South Carolina, 3,500 primates owned by the NIH are bred and confined on the island that received over $33 million in recent years just for maintenance, in addition to the tens of millions wasted to experiment on the animals.

Hundreds of the primates on the island are captured every year, then sent to NIH’s bioagent superlab in Montana and other federal labs where they are subjected to some of the government’s wasteful and most painful experiments. Primates from the island have been infected with Ebola, MERS, and other debilitating diseases and denied any pain relief. When the testing concludes, the monkeys are killed—even the healthy ones.

Paul’s new Festivus report also highlights other wasteful spending uncovered by WCW, including Fauci’s biting fly experiments on beagles in Tunisia, and nearly $2 million from NIH to crack open monkeys’ skulls, inject their brains with wheat germ and horseradish, dehydrate them, lock them in restraint chairs, and then force them to gamble on computer screens for a sip of water.

In another project funded by NIH with grants that have raked in nearly $12 million of your money to create meth head monkeys: white coats implanted electrodes in monkeys’ skulls and eyes and dosed them with methamphetamines to observe their sleeping habits.

Taxpayers also foot the bill for a silly USDA study to determine whether black or yellow Labradors get hotter when walking in sunshine! The conclusion? The color of the coat doesn’t matter.

You can read the rest of Sen. Rand Paul’s Festivus report here.

Last year, Sen. Paul’s Festivus report highlighted our Coke Hounds exposé, where we exposed how the NIH wasted over $2 million to inject beagle puppies with cocaine.

And we’ve worked with him on many previous Festivus reports. WCW recognized Sen. Paul as a Waste Warrior awardee in 2017 and again in 2021.

Waste like this is how taxpayers end up with a $20-billion-plus bill for cruel and pointless animal experiments each year.

We won’t wait until next Festivus to cut down on this ridiculous, wasteful spending. A growing majority of taxpayers—from Democrats to Republicans to Independents—oppose animal experiments and do not want to be forced to pay for them.