As the Biden-Harris administration prepares to fade into a national memory, it has authorized massive government spending most Americans would find offensive — including $10,000 for a troupe of singing drag queens to put on an innuendo-laden ice-skating show promoting climate change ideology. Additional federal grants are supporting the censorship of conservatives, the torture of cats, and the promotion of race-based programs.

Skating on Thin Ice with the Bearded Ladies

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded a $10,000 grant to the Bearded Ladies Cabaret — which describes itself as “a queer experimental cabaret company” — to put on an ice-skating show promoting climate change in the city of our nation’s founding. In fact, the troupe will put on two sets of shows, one more sexually charged than the other. “The evening shows, called ‘Beards on Ice: Edging,’ are geared toward a more mature audience. A kid-friendly ‘Family Skate’ show on Saturday mornings will feature the same messages about climate change, but with less innuendo,” reported Philadelphia media outlet WHYY about last year’s shows. One might refer to the cross-dressers’ decision to offer “less” sexual innuendo to children than they include in their adult act a form of grooming.

The drag queens shows blended environmental extremism with gender ideology by replacing Mother Nature with “nonbinary parental guardian nature,” noted WHYY.

The Bearded Ladies Cabaret received NEA “Promotion of the Arts” grant Federal Award Identification Number (FAIN) 1926283-78-24, which runs from January 1 to March 31 of this year. The purpose of the program, according to the grant’s website, is to “support opportunities for all people to participate in the arts and arts education, integrate the arts with strategies that promote the well-being and resilience of people and communities, and build capacity and infrastructure within the arts sector through knowledge-sharing, tools, resources, and evidence-based practices.”

Does transgenderism “promote the well-being and resilience of people and communities?” A 2014 study found individuals suffering from Gender Identity Disorder had higher rates of schizophrenia, and a 2020 study found those who identify as transgender were 636% more likely to have autism than the general population. Does transgenderism rely on “evidence-based practices”? In crafting its 8th edition of its Standards of Care (SOC), the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) cited a castration fetish forum co-created by convicted pedophile Thomas Pidel. After all, if a child can legally consent to change his sex, he can legally consent to sex.

The NEA became a flashpoint in the culture wars in the 1980s, when U.S. taxpayers funded sadomasochistic homoerotic pornography by Robert Mapplethorpe and the blasphemous art of Andrés Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” which depicted a picture of a crucifix submerged in the photographer’s urine. “This matter does not involve freedom of artistic expression — it does involve the question whether American taxpayers should be forced to support such trash,” said a letter from a bipartisan coalition of 23 U.S. senators in 1989. Then-Rep. Phil Crane (R-Ill.) introduced a bill to abolish the NEA, but neoconservative foes talked Republican leaders into seeking “balance” in federal grant recipients.

President Donald Trump proposed eliminating all funding to the NEA, as well as public broadcasting, in his 2018 budget. Instead, the NEA’s budget grew by $17 million under President Trump and nearly $40 million under the Biden-Harris administration (not including $135 million in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021). In November 2023, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) offered an amendment to defund the NEA, which failed — with 87 Republicans voting against it. FRC Action has opposed increased NEA funding for decades.

Some argue the NEA’s $207 million appropriation represents a tiny fraction of the $6.75 trillion U.S. budget — an argument dismissed by those concerned over the possible approach of U.S. economic insolvency. “Spending $10k on drag ice skating may feel like a drop in the bucket, but every dollar counts when our country is facing serious issues and massive debt,” says Senator Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) year-end report. The national debt currently stands at $36 trillion.

The controversial federal projects are just part of more than $1 trillion in wasteful spending documented by Paul in “The Festivus Report 2024,” released during the holiday season. “The NEA, the federal agency tasked with supporting ‘artistic excellence,’ apparently decided this was the pinnacle of cultural innovation,” says the report. “The NEA’s $10,000 grant to Beards on Ice raises questions about the agency’s priorities.”

Paul’s annual round-up finds that wasteful federal spending has more than doubled over the last three years, from $482,276,543,907 in 2022, to $900 billion in 2023, and a whopping $1,008,313,329,626.12 in 2024.

Aside from the bearded ladies promotion, the Festivus report detailed taxpayer-funded grants aimed at harming animals and censoring conservative thought

Hundreds of Thousands of Taxpayer Dollars to Censor Conservative Views

Taxpayers paid $330,000 to censor conservative views around the world. The grant flowed from taxpayers’ pockets to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), then to the Global Engagement Center (GEC), finally to the British-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI). GDI then claimed some news outlets posed a high risk of presenting misinformation and disinformation — which advertisers then used to withhold funds from those websites.

“Among the ten ‘riskiest’ outlets identified by GDI are The New York Post, American Spectator, Newsmax, The American Conservative, The Blaze, One America News, The Daily Wire, Reason, RealClearPolitics, and The Federalist. Their crime? Not toeing the line of a particular political narrative,” notes the report. “Meanwhile, left-leaning outlets like The New York Times, HuffPost, NPR, and BuzzFeed, were conveniently labeled as ‘less risky.’”

“This is nothing short of a disgraceful misuse of public funds, aimed squarely at stifling free speech, competition, and manipulating public discourse. It’s an attack on the very freedoms this country was built on,” the report concludes.

Although the GEC is supposed to be defunded, evidence has emerged that its personnel have simply been reassigned to other parts of the government, while pursuing the same agenda.

Government-Sponsored Racism, Cat Torture, Lockdown Research

The National Science Foundation (NSF) spent $288,563 to create “affinity groups” for bird-watchers, so armchair orinthologists can flock only with others who share the same race, sex, or other characteristics.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spent $2.24 million over the last three years on a Cornell University experiment that injected healthy cats with the COVID-19 virus. “Not only is this a waste of over a million in taxpayer dollars, but the experiments have led to the suffering and death of over thirty cats,” notes the report, which highlights an additional $650,000 for the experiments in 2024.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spent $419,4700 to determine whether rats used more cocaine if researchers kept them starved and isolated. The government injected rats with cocaine and placed them in compartments that isolated them from others. To no great surprise, they found that isolated, lonely rats sought out drugs more than others.

Funding Foreign Influencers

Former Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall has documented how the Biden-Harris administration has artificially prolonged the war between Ukraine and Russia. The 2024 Festivus Report notes that the State Department spent $4,840,082 million for “KYIV, Ukraine public affairs — Influencer Staff” to make videos about the conflict. “The dangers here are more than just cringeworthy content; this kind of spending opens the door to disinformation, propaganda, and international PR disasters. And don’t even get me started on the potential to escalate tensions with other nations,” states the report.

The department also spent “$15,220 on an ‘influencers event’ and another $22,231 on a ‘USAID Social Media Influencers Campaign,’” the report notes.

The State Department spent another $345,434 on a program encouraging young people to play football in the name of fighting terrorism. “In 2022, the U.S. Department of State spent $98,765 on a grant to ‘counter recruitment and build resilience against terrorism and violent extremism for at-risk communities in Albania primarily using sport (football) as a means of engagement.’ This grant went to the Football for Peace Foundation, which is based out of London, England.” The State Department spent another $246,699 for the UK Football for Peace Foundation to work its magic in Serbia and the Maldives islands. The campaign reportedly included the hashtag #FootballSavesLives.

As the report highlights, all this spending is taking place as American citizens must pay $13,138 more annually to maintain the same level of consumption they enjoyed before Bidenflation began inflating prices in January 2021.