Lawmakers last year demanded to know how an AI researcher in China acquired $30 million in U.S. grants. In 2021, Song-Chun Zhu was the lead investigator on two projects totaling $1.2 million from DOD grants seeking to develop "high-level robot autonomy" that is "important for DoD tasks," and "cognitive robot platforms" for "intelligence and surveillance systems."
Additionally, the Defense Department inspector general found last summer that $46.7 million in defense funds from 2014 to 2023 had gone to EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab many suspect was the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Under a use-it-or-lose-it policy, in the last month of the fiscal year, federal agencies work to spend all that is left in their federal budgets, worried that Congress will appropriate them a smaller amount next year if not. The Pentagon is no exception.
In September 2024, the DOD spent more than it had in any other month since 2008, with a hefty taxpayer price tag for fine dining.
It spent $6.1 million on lobster tails, $16.6 million on rib-eye steaks, 6.4 million on salmon and $407,000 on Alaskan king crab, as highlighted in an X thread by Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa.
That same month, DOD spent $211.7 million on new furniture, including $36,000 on foot rests.
Cost-cutting initiatives will face opposition from a Congress that has never been keen to take a scalpel to the nation's defenses.
"If history is any kind of precedent, I do think that this is where you'll start to see at least a real sort of tension arise," said Diana Shaw, former State Department Inspector General. "There are a lot of vested interests, and not just economic."
"There are folks with philosophical interests in the entire defense infrastructure and the military. And so, this is an area that has been well protected historically. And so I do think this now will be an interesting test case to see whether there will be, even within the Republican Party now, some pushback to the sort of aggressive cutting and picking apart that we've seen happen at other agencies that have historically been sort of less favored by members of the Republican Party."
Original article source: $1,300 coffee cups, 8,000% overpay for soap dispensers show waste as DOGE locks in on Pentagon
The Staff: I found the above and after reading, got really pissed as we have heard about the $250 hammers and $300 toilet seats. Support Musk and trying to shine a light on this crap.