Government spent $10k to literally watch grass grow

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last updated 8 January 2015

For the last five years, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has released the Wastebook, an annual illustrated compendium of "the 100 most outlandish government expenditures this year." Coburn is retiring from Congress after this year, so he released Wastebook 2014 a little early — and, yes, our government spent $10,000 to watch grass grow.

Wastebook 2014 also features $387,000 spent to give rabbits Swedish massages with machines, $171,000 spent to teach monkeys to play games to "unlock the secrets of free will," and — most troubling — $1 billion spent by the Pentagon to destroy $16 billion of unused ammunition. Other lowlights include:

* State department tweets @ terrorists: $3 million

* Mountain lions on a treadmill: $856,000

* Synchronized swimming for sea monkeys: $50,000

* Studying "hangry" spouses stabbing voodoo dolls: $331,000

* Promoting U.S. culture around the globe with nose flutists: $90 million

Coburn's project has successfully resulted in the cancellation of at least one silly spending project so far: "$5,210 that the State Department tried to spend on a blowup, human-size foosball field for an embassy in Belize."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.