25 Craziest Things The U.S. Government Spends Money On
The U.S. federal government spent approximately $6.9 trillion in fiscal year 2023 — roughly 24% of the entire national GDP. With a national debt now exceeding $34 trillion, you’d think every dollar would be scrutinized with laser precision. Yet year after year, watchdog groups, investigative journalists, and government auditors uncover spending that leaves taxpayers scratching their heads, laughing in disbelief, or outright furious.
From funding studies on why chimpanzees throw poop to spending millions on uniforms that never got worn, the 25 craziest things the U.S. government spends money on range from the genuinely baffling to the almost comically wasteful. Some of these expenditures have sparked congressional investigations. Others quietly slipped through the cracks of a budget too enormous for anyone to fully audit.
“Crazy” is, admittedly, a subjective label. Supporters of some of these programs offer reasonable-sounding justifications. But when you’re staring down a $34 trillion debt, spending $700,000 on a robotic squirrel tends to raise a few eyebrows. Here are 25 examples that have fueled the ongoing national debate about fiscal responsibility.
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Absurd Scientific Research Funded by Taxpayers
1. Studying Duck Penises — $3 Million
The National Science Foundation awarded Yale University approximately $3 million to study the evolution of duck genitalia. The research examined how female ducks’ reproductive anatomy has evolved in response to forced mating attempts by male ducks. While evolutionary biology is a legitimate scientific field, critics — including members of Congress — pointed to this grant as a prime example of misplaced federal research priorities.
2. Shrimp on Treadmills — $682,570
The National Science Foundation funded a study at the College of Charleston where researchers placed shrimp on underwater treadmills to measure their exercise capacity under stress. The original grant was for marine biology research, but the treadmill experiments became a cultural lightning rod after Senator Tom Coburn highlighted them in his annual “Wastebook” report. The image of tiny shrimp jogging on miniature treadmills became one of the most-mocked government expenditures of the last two decades.
3. Why Chimpanzees Throw Poop — $2.6 Million
Researchers at Emory University received approximately $2.6 million in federal funding to investigate why chimpanzees hurl feces — and what it reveals about the evolution of human communication. The study concluded that chimps that were better throwers also tended to have more developed left brain hemispheres, potentially offering insight into the origins of language. Still, the headline alone made this a perennial favorite on government waste lists.
4. The Sex Lives of Japanese Quail — $175,000
The National Institutes of Health funded a study examining how cocaine affects the sexual behavior of Japanese quail. The stated goal was to better understand how drug abuse affects human sexual behavior and contributes to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Noble intent or not, spending $175,000 watching drug-addled quail engage in mating behaviors struck most taxpayers as a stretch.
5. Teaching Monkeys to Gamble — $171,000
Researchers at Yale received federal funding to teach monkeys to understand and respond to economic concepts — specifically, gambling and risk assessment. The project explored whether loss aversion is a biologically hardwired trait rather than a learned human behavior. Critics argued the findings, while mildly interesting, didn’t justify the price tag when the national debt was climbing by the day.
6. A Study on Why People Fall in Love — $1 Million
The National Science Foundation funded a series of studies totaling around $1 million to investigate the neurological basis of romantic attraction. The researchers used MRI brain scans to identify which neural regions activate when people view photos of loved ones. Basic neuroscience research does have value, but the framing of the grant drew widespread mockery from fiscal conservatives who questioned whether the federal government should be funding love science.
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Military Overspending and Equipment Failures
7. $1 Billion in Unused Uniforms in Afghanistan
The Department of Defense spent over $1 billion on camouflage uniforms for the Afghan National Army — only to discover that the chosen pattern was poorly suited to Afghanistan’s predominantly desert and mountainous terrain. The pattern was reportedly selected partly because Afghan officials liked its appearance. Citizens Against Government Waste flagged this as one of the most egregious examples of defense procurement gone wrong.
8. $28 Million on the Wrong Camouflage
In a related but separate camouflage debacle, the U.S. military spent approximately $28 million on a woodland camouflage pattern for uniforms issued in Afghanistan — a country that has very little woodland. This spending was cited in a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report and highlighted by Reader’s Digest as a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic disconnect from ground realities.
9. $10 Billion Cost Overrun on a Coast Guard Cutter
The U.S. Coast Guard’s Deepwater program — designed to modernize the aging fleet of cutters and aircraft — ballooned from its original budget into a program with cost overruns exceeding $10 billion. Poorly designed vessels had to be taken out of service almost immediately after delivery, and some newly built ships literally buckled under stress tests. Congress eventually terminated significant portions of the contract, but not before the damage was done.
10. $43 Million for a Gas Station in Afghanistan
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported that the U.S. Task Force for Business and Stability Operations spent $43 million to build a single compressed natural gas filling station in Afghanistan. A comparable station would cost roughly $500,000 in neighboring Pakistan. The Task Force spent the money but could not adequately explain the cost discrepancy — and was subsequently shut down.
11. $150 Billion in Unaudited Pentagon Spending
The Department of Defense failed its first-ever independent audit in 2018 — a sprawling financial review that attempted to account for $2.7 trillion in assets. Auditors could not verify the existence or condition of significant portions of Pentagon property, contracts, and equipment. Estimates of annual unaccounted-for spending vary, but some analyses put the total at well over $150 billion in assets that simply could not be traced.
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Bizarre Foreign Aid and International Projects
12. Teaching Chinese Prostitutes to Drink Responsibly — $387,000
The National Institutes of Health funded a study that sent researchers to China to teach female sex workers how to drink alcohol in moderation. The stated public health rationale was to reduce risky behavior linked to HIV transmission. Even granting the public health intent, the optics of sending nearly $400,000 in U.S. taxpayer money abroad for this purpose generated considerable outrage.
13. Studying “Pleasure” Among the Elderly in Argentina — $2.5 Million
The National Institutes of Health provided $2.5 million in grant funding to study how “pleasure” affects the health and wellbeing of elderly Argentinians. The Heritage Foundation flagged this grant as emblematic of federal agencies funding research abroad that had tenuous connections to American public health priorities. The study raised the question of whether foreign lifestyle research should rank above domestic health needs.
14. A $10 Million Virtual Border Fence That Didn’t Work
The Department of Homeland Security spent approximately $10 million developing a “virtual border fence” — a network of sensors, cameras, and radar towers designed to detect illegal border crossings. The system, piloted in Arizona, was plagued by technical failures, weather interference, and poor contractor performance. DHS ultimately scrapped the project after it consistently failed field tests, leaving taxpayers holding a $10 million bill for a fence that existed only in name.
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Administrative Bloat and Bureaucratic Inefficiency
15. $823,000 for a Lavish GSA Conference in Las Vegas
The General Services Administration (GSA) — the federal agency responsible for managing government property and procurement — spent $823,000 on a four-day training conference in Las Vegas in 2010. Expenses included $44 per person for in-room sushi, a $6,325 “team building” exercise involving a mind reader, and commemorative coins. The scandal led to multiple resignations and congressional hearings, making it one of the most notorious examples of federal conference excess.
16. $500,000 in IRS Employee Entertainment
The Internal Revenue Service spent approximately $500 million (across multiple fiscal years) on employee “training” conferences that included lavish hotel stays, custom-made videos, and entertainment — according to a Treasury Inspector General report. Individual conferences ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The agency was simultaneously enforcing tax compliance on ordinary Americans.
17. A $1.5 Million “Talking” Trash Can
Citizens Against Government Waste reported that the federal government allocated $1.5 million in transportation funding for a decorative, talking trash can in a California city. The receptacle was designed to greet passersby and encourage recycling. While public art and infrastructure occasionally overlap productively, few taxpayers could justify this price tag for a garbage bin with a personality.
18. Robotic Squirrel — $700,000
The National Science Foundation funded a California State University research team to build a robotic squirrel — dubbed “RoboSquirrel” — to study how rattlesnakes respond to the squirrel’s signature tail-waving defense mechanism. Citizens Against Government Waste highlighted the project, noting that while animal behavior research has its place, a $700,000 animatronic rodent was a difficult sell to the American public.
19. $2.6 Billion in Improper Medicaid Payments — Per Year
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has repeatedly identified improper payments within the Medicaid system, with some annual estimates exceeding $100 billion government-wide. Within Medicaid specifically, regular audits have found billions in payments made to deceased beneficiaries, ineligible recipients, and fraudulent providers. The structural complexity of the program — administered across 50 states — makes systematic fraud detection extraordinarily difficult.
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Technology Failures and IT Disasters
20. Healthcare.gov Launch — $2 Billion and Counting
The federal healthcare exchange website Healthcare.gov famously crashed on its launch day in October 2013, unable to handle traffic that government contractors had been warned to expect. The initial rollout cost taxpayers approximately $2 billion, and subsequent repair and redesign work pushed costs higher still. A project that was supposed to simplify access to health insurance instead became a byword for federal IT mismanagement.
21. The FBI’s Virtual Case File System — $170 Million
The FBI spent $170 million developing a digital case management system called “Virtual Case File” — then scrapped the entire project in 2005 without deploying it. Contractors delivered software that FBI agents found unusable, riddled with bugs, and fundamentally incompatible with how the bureau actually operated. The agency then started over, spending hundreds of millions more on a replacement system called “Sentinel.”
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Strange Infrastructure and Development Projects
22. The “Bridge to Nowhere” — $398 Million
Perhaps the most famous example of pork-barrel spending in American history, the Gravina Island Bridge in Alaska was earmarked for $398 million in federal transportation funding. The proposed bridge would have connected the city of Ketchikan (population ~8,000) to a small island with an airport and roughly 50 residents. Intense national ridicule — and significant credit to Senator John McCain’s repeated mockery of the project — eventually led to Congress redirecting the funds, though Alaska kept the money.
23. A Museum for Woodstock — $1 Million
Congressional earmarks have funded some remarkable projects over the years, and a proposed museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock music festival in New York received $1 million in federal funding. Senator John McCain included this earmark on his list of the most egregious spending examples. The museum project was eventually abandoned, though only after the money had already been appropriated.
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Questionable Grants and Promotional Spending
24. $10,000 to Develop a Video Game About Herding Cats
The federal government has periodically funded game development through grants — including a reported $10,000 allocated to develop a video game centered on the concept of herding cats. Government watchdog groups flagged the grant as part of a broader pattern of federal arts and technology funding that lacked rigorous cost-benefit analysis. The game was never commercially released.
25. $100 Million in Unused Federal Real Estate
The federal government owns more than 45 million square feet of building space it considers “excess” or “underutilized,” according to the Government Accountability Office. Maintaining, heating, cooling, and securing this unused property costs taxpayers an estimated $100 million or more per year. The Office of Management and Budget has repeatedly called for consolidation, but bureaucratic inertia — different agencies protecting their floor space — has slowed reform to a crawl.
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The Bigger Picture: Why Does Government Waste Keep Happening?
Understanding these 25 examples requires looking at the structural forces that enable them.
The “use it or lose it” budget mentality is one of the most persistent drivers of waste. Federal agencies that fail to spend their entire annual budget often receive smaller allocations the following year. This creates a perverse incentive to burn through remaining funds before the fiscal year ends — on conferences, equipment, or studies that might not otherwise pass scrutiny.
Lack of meaningful oversight compounds the problem. A $6.9 trillion budget simply cannot be line-itemed by Congress with the rigor a private CFO would apply. Thousands of grants, contracts, and earmarks pass with minimal review.
Pork-barrel spending — where legislators attach locally beneficial projects to must-pass legislation — has historically been a major contributor. While earmark reform has curbed some of the worst abuses since 2011, the practice never disappeared entirely.
Contractor accountability gaps allow technology and infrastructure projects to balloon beyond original budgets with limited consequences for the firms involved. The FBI’s Virtual Case File and Healthcare.gov are both products of systems where contractors faced few penalties for catastrophic underperformance.
Finally, bureaucratic fragmentation means no single agency has full visibility into the federal government’s total expenditures. The GAO and Inspector General offices do remarkable work, but they’re always reporting on what already happened — rarely stopping waste in real time.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much money does the U.S. government waste each year?
Estimates vary widely depending on how “waste” is defined. The Government Accountability Office identified over $247 billion in improper payments government-wide in fiscal year 2022 alone. Broader estimates that include inefficiency, cost overruns, and low-value spending push the annual figure considerably higher.
What is pork-barrel spending?
Pork-barrel spending refers to government funding secured by legislators for projects that primarily benefit their home districts or states rather than the national interest. The “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska is one of the most cited examples in American political history.
Who monitors wasteful government spending?
Several organizations track federal waste, including the Government Accountability Office (GAO), various agency Inspectors General, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and independent watchdog groups like Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and the Heritage Foundation.
Has any of this spending been stopped or recovered?
Some expenditures have led to real consequences — the GSA Las Vegas conference triggered resignations and tighter conference spending rules. The Bridge to Nowhere’s funds were ultimately redirected. The FBI’s failed Virtual Case File system prompted congressional hearings. But in many cases, the money was spent before anyone could intervene.
Are all government-funded scientific studies wasteful?
Not at all. Many seemingly odd studies have produced genuinely valuable insights. Basic research — including studies on animal behavior — has led to medical breakthroughs and technology innovations. The debate isn’t whether all research is worthless, but whether the federal government applies sufficient rigor in prioritizing which research it funds.
What can ordinary citizens do about government waste?
Citizens can contact their congressional representatives, support independent watchdog organizations, follow GAO and Inspector General reports, and vote for candidates who prioritize fiscal accountability. Sites like USASpending.gov allow the public to search federal expenditures in real time, making it easier than ever to follow the money.
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The Takeaway
The 25 craziest things the U.S. government spends money on aren’t just punchlines — they’re symptoms of a spending system that lacks the accountability mechanisms most Americans would expect at this scale. A robotic squirrel here, a talking trash can there, a billion-dollar uniform purchase nobody wanted — these individual items may seem minor against a $6.9 trillion budget. But they reflect patterns of oversight failure that affect far larger expenditures.
Sites like List25 have long documented the fascinating and bizarre corners of our world, and government waste certainly qualifies on both counts. The real question isn’t whether some of this spending was genuinely absurd — it clearly was. The question is what structural reforms would be required to make it the exception rather than an annual tradition. That’s a debate every taxpayer deserves to be part of.