Let's Cut Some Spending: $7 million for a ‘smart toilet'

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 that 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: $7 million for a ‘smart toilet!’

CNS News reports:

As explained in (Rand Paul's) The Festivus Report 2020, researchers at Stanford University used $6,973,057 in funds granted through the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a so-called 'smart toilet.' The purpose of the toilet is to develop 'easily deployable hardware and software for the long-term analysis of a user’s excreta through data collection and models of human health,' state the researchers in an abstract… In a concluding comment on this $6,973,057 item, Sen. Paul says, 'I’ll leave it to the researchers to explain to those afflicted with these illnesses and their loved ones why they used NCI money intended to develop non-invasive early cancer screening processes to design a toilet that nobody will use anyway.

Flushing our tax dollars away. Literally.