(BigGovernment.news) Just when you thought the federal government couldn’t sink to new lows when it came to wasting taxpayer money, along comes a report from a U.S. senator that blows that assumption out of the water.

Of all the nefarious “research” the taxpayer, via the National Institutes of Health and other federal entities, has had to fund over the years, this one might be the most ridiculous: Paying a scientist to have a bee sting him in various places to find out where it hurts the most, including his penis.

As reported by the Washington Times, that little nugget was just one of several other examples of wasteful government spending compiled by Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., recently. And with a national debt approaching $20 trillion, every penny counts.

Other incredible examples of wasteful spending on so-called scientific research include:

— Paying researchers to figure out that cheerleaders look more attractive as a group rather than as individuals;

— A study concluding that Democratic women in Congress were less feminine than Republican women – research that went so far as to even identify the lawmakers who were thought to score low on the femininity scale as part of a $50,000 National Science Foundation grant to the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA).

Budgets in D.C. are always tight (and in the red), but Flake’s office noted these outrageous expenditures come at a time of decreased military spending (in a world where dangers increase by the day), a growing opioid epidemic, decrepit and aging U.S. infrastructure and demands for new spending to fight the Zika virus.

“It’s time that Washington set clear goals for federally-funded research, improved transparency to ensure tax dollars are being prioritized to meet to those goals and reduced wasteful and duplicative spending on lesser priorities,” Flake said as he released his report, “Twenty Questions: Profiles in Federally Funded Science.”

Speaking of the Defense Department, it isn’t blameless when it comes to wasteful spending, either. At a time when Republicans and some Democrats in Congress call for an injection of tens of billions of dollars in additional spending to upgrade and develop weapons systems, the Pentagon spent money on a “study” to figure out why people spill coffee when the walk, Flake discovered.

In another example, Flake said researchers fed alcohol-laced grape juice to finches to see if the birds would start slurring their birdsongs when drunk. They did, slightly, researchers at the Oregon Health & Science University concluded.

Oh, good. Now we can all sleep better at night since we’ve got that settled.

Flake has introduced legislation that would require the White House to develop a system that would enable it to weed out duplicative research while requiring agencies that fund research to post a summary, funding details and other information about unclassified studies that taxpayers pay for.

We’ll see how that works out.

By the way, at to the bee-sting study, the researcher concluded that it hurt more to get stung on the nose and upper lip than the penis, the latter area third-worst out of a list of 25.

More:

• Waste not, want not: Report exposes hundreds of BILLIONS every year in duplicate govt. spending
• Taxpayers forced to spend hundreds of millions on more inefficient ethanol
• Rand Paul announces big government waste ‘bracket’ winners

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