Sen. Coburn takes parting shot at pouncing pumas
Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who has railed for years against wasteful government spending, issued his fifth and final annual "Wastebook," a catalog of dumb and/or badly run government programs, including, this time, a puma on a treadmill.
Coburn is leaving Congress at the end of the year, but he is not going out quietly. He writes scathingly of both bumbling bureaucrats and the Congress that enables them:
Only someone with too much of someone else’s money and not enough accountability for how it was being spent could come up some of the zany projects the government paid for this year, like laughing classes for college students (no joke!) or a play about brain eating zombies for children. The National Science Foundation (NSF) taught monkeys how to play video games and gamble. USDA got into the business of butterfly farming. The Department of Interior even paid people to watch grass to see how quickly it grows. The State Department spent money to dispel the perception abroad that Americans are fat and rude. But the real shock and awe may have been the $1 billion price tag the Pentagon paid to destroy $16 billion worth of ammunition, enough to pay a full years’ salary for over 54,000 Army privates. . . .
Congress’ role is not just passing bills. It is also responsible for conducting oversight to hold the executive branch accountable, which it is failing to do. In fact, Congress actually forced federal agencies to waste billions of dollars for purely parochial, political purposes. Mississippi lawmakers, for example, attached a rider to a larger bill requiring NASA to build a $350 million launch pad tower, which was moth balled as soon as it was completed because the rockets it was designed to test were scrapped years ago. Likewise, when USDA attempted to close an unneeded sheep research station in Idaho costing nearly $2 million every year to operate, politicians in the region stepped in to keep it open.
Washington politicians are more focused on their own political futures than the future of our country.
Many of the things on Coburn's waste list includes 100 outrages, some of which have received significant media coverage -- like this Washington Post story about the millions paid to federal workers while they are on "administrative leave," often for bad behavior -- to those that have received little attention, like the pouncing pumas.
Coburn draws the reader's attention to a release from the University of California at Santa Cruz about federally funded research on "mountain lion energetics" that provided insights into "how much energy the big cats use to stalk, pounce, and overpower their prey." The study used motion sensor collars on pumas in the wild -- a kind of feline Fitbit -- to track how much energy they were expending during various activities, but then needed a baseline to compare it to. As the UCSC release explains:
Before (lead researcher Terrie) Williams and her team could interpret the data from collars deployed on wild mountain lions, however, they first had to perform calibration studies with mountain lions in captivity. This meant, among other things, training mountain lions to walk and run on a treadmill and measuring their oxygen consumption at different activity levels. Those studies took a bit longer than planned.
"People just didn't believe you could get a mountain lion on a treadmill, and it took me three years to find a facility that was willing to try," Williams said.
The point of this research is to find out more about the lifestyle of non-captive mountain lions in order to create better plans for their management and conservation. But Coburn is unimpressed.
"What people won’t have a hard time believing is the federal government would pay to put the big cats on a treadmill," he wrote, noting that several other federally funded research projects have involved animals on exercise equipment. Coburn pegs the total cost to the taxpayer of the puma pounce study at $856,000.
He concludes:
While support for basic science is not itself wasteful, federal research agencies should better prioritize how tax dollars are directed to ensure adequate support for more pressing scientific endeavors. With Congress racking up deficits and leaving nearly an $18 trillion debt for the next generation, scarce resources should be used to pay down the debt or on higher priorities, such as emerging biological threats that could pounce on anyone of us.
In a statement issued with the report, Coburn said “I have learned from these experiences that Washington will never change itself. But even if the politicians won’t stop stupid spending, taxpayers always have the last word.”