Let's Cut Some Spending: $556,584 to measure animal poop

Remember the absolutely critical Omnibus spending bill Congress muscled through at the end of last year? It was 4,000 pages that no one read and cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion.

In our Let's Cut Some Spending series, ForAmerica will chronicle parts of the 2021 and 2022 spending bills from a variety of sources that you probably don't know about - programs, grants and spending of all kinds that should have never happened in the first place and many that are still happening.

Today’s offering: $556,584 to measure animal poop!

The New York Post reports:

Cowa-Dung-a!

Cost: $556,584

A smelly study funded mainly by the National Science Foundation measured animal poop to test “a mathematical model of defecation.” Researchers recorded footage of pandas, elephants, warthogs, and more in their most private moments, then examined and weighed the bowel movements, taking notes on the feces’ size and shape and recording the duration of defecation.

The crappy study collected poop samples from 43 species at Zoo Atlanta, university animal facilities, and farms. The scientists’ “doody”: to discover new non-invasive methods of diagnosing animal illnesses. If you’ve ever wondered just how much dung a lion produces each day (less than one pound, it turns out), your taxpayer dollars have been well spent.

Wasteful spending on... animal waste?

Where do we even begin?

While we try each day in our 'Let's Cut Some Spending' series to highlight yet another absurd thing American tax dollars is being wasted on, this one is particularly gross.

And absolutely UNNECESSARY.

But what's a mere half million dollars to this government?