On the recordMay 4, 2015
today I return to the floor of the Senate for my ninth installment of ``Waste of the Week.'' I think the Presiding Officer has been here for most of those nine installments. My purpose has been straightforward: to highlight waste, fraud, and abuse in Federal spending. So far, we have reached a potential taxpayer savings of almost $50 billion. I have a chart here which shows the ever-increasing amount of red ink, representing waste of taxpayers' dollars, caused by fraud and abuse and waste from programs that simply haven't proven their effectiveness. We are on the way to $100 billion. Today we are going to reach and go over the halfway mark. We are going to continue to do this, and, hopefully, we will be extending this chart in the future, which now shows just some examples of what we have provided before. The largest example of waste, fraud, and abuse disclosed was found in the refundable child care tax credit to the tune of $20 billion in potential savings. These are from people who did not qualify--they were ineligible for receipt--yet over a 10-year period of time, they will receive $20 billion which they are not entitled to. The smallest but by far the most inexplicable--and even laughable and ludicrous--example of waste was a $387,000 grant for a study to determine whether massages on New Zealand rabbits after strenuous exercise would help their recovery time.…
