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Fed Fumbles Add Up to Ridiculous Waste

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WASHINGTON -- Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., has had it with government's out-of-control spending and regulating.

"The federal government doesn't ask how much do we have. The federal government asks what do we want to do? And they just put it into practice," Lankford said during a Capitol Hill news conference Monday.

It hurts bad enough that government taxes away almost every dollar Americans make through April every year. But there's also the hidden cost of $14,974 a year the average American household pays to cover the annual $2.028 trillion cost of federal regulation.

It hurts even worse when you find out some of the stuff that money is paying for: Like $2.6 million on a weight-loss program for overweight truck drivers.

Syrian Rebel for $4 Million

The Pentagon spent $250 million in a program aimed at training and arming some 5,400 Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. But after about a year, only 60 rebels had been trained.

That works out to $4 million a rebel.

The Oklahoma senator called these "federal fumbles." In a new report, he outlined a hundred such cases, like one he mentioned at the news conference.

"The National Park Service did a study on what do bugs do when you turn on a light in a dark rural place," Lankford said. "Every person in rural Oklahoma can tell you what bugs do when you turn on a light in a dark place."

Multi-Million Dollar Gas Station

About $43 million went to build a gas station in Afghanistan to sell compressed natural gas. A comparable station elsewhere costs just $500,000.

To make it worse: there's no delivery system in Afghanistan for compressed natural gas. Afghans couldn't afford it anyway since it costs more to convert a car to compressed natural gas than most Afghans make in a year.

The same Pentagon is offering a $283,000 grant to track the daily activities of tiny woodland birds called gnatcatchers.

Lankford insisted there's no more time for such waste with the monstrous debt America already has.  

Centuries of Debt

The senator pointed out if the budget goes into surplus a decade from now as projected, and every penny of the expected $50 billion annual surplus went to debt-reduction, "We would have to continue to do it for the next 460 years to pay off our debt."

With the country closing in on $19 trillion of debt, you'd think the highest priority might be on spending only what's necessary and regulating only what's essential.  

But as Sen. Lankford's new report shows, government waste just keeps piling up higher and higher. 

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About The Author

Paul
Strand

As senior correspondent in CBN's Washington bureau, Paul Strand has covered a variety of political and social issues, with an emphasis on defense, justice, and Congress. Strand began his tenure at CBN News in 1985 as an evening assignment editor in Washington, D.C. After a year, he worked with CBN Radio News for three years, returning to the television newsroom to accept a position as editor in 1990. After five years in Virginia Beach, Strand moved back to the nation's capital, where he has been a correspondent since 1995. Before joining CBN News, Strand served as the newspaper editor for