Can we get some bipartisan agreement on government waste?

There is a lot of Rand Paul whiny BS here.

The Egyptian aid is no doubt part of the aid stream that the USA has given since the original accords. By designating the aid that way, a lot probably got back to USA vendors and consultants.

The Russian cats appear to be some sort of electrodiagnostic testing research.  The issue here is probably ethical and not financial.

The DoD lobster tank is probably for a food prep facility. The DoD feeds a lot of people. Also, this was 2016, so Rand is grasping...

www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_HDEC0417P0013_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-

Way too many of Paul's examples are his anti-Fauci, anti-vaxx axe being ground.

The "improper payments" are largely medicare/medicaid and tax fraud. Those who bitch about additional IRS agents take note.

Rand has a particular obsession with any addiction research involving animals. Not convinced he is in the right there.

You have any info on the Barbie thing? That one I can't make sense of. 

Your post intrigues me. You sound like you know where the bodies are buried in education like I do in healthcare (non-profit CEO's with private jets to Cabo, for example). I'm hit or miss on his picks, honestly. This Dept. of Ed one feels like a troll, obv. I DO NOT want to see this shut down, but I also don't understand with all the money we pour into education, why my grandchildren come home with lists of donation needs for their classrooms. Then again, Whitmer isn't exactly a braintrust. She's probably buying every school in MI electric buses while most of them need new insulated windows. 

TLDR: Fed Depart of Education should be more guidance,  help in funding in struggling areas, and stop being a top down model and more of a bottom up. 

The Chica is still in the system in the admin of a military state run public boarding school. She's 24ish years in with 19 being normal public elementary school. I help tutor so I am affiliated with 2 school districts and work pretty closely with teachers and admins... 

I don't know where the bodies are but the general sense I get from my peeps is that a federal department is needed, but only to set basic requirements, help shift some money to struggling states (i know fucking communism) especially for special needs and elective programs, to help track trends, deficiencies, surfeits, etc. To help with supplements and other secondary and tertiary needs. Right now it's more of a top down model when they want a bottom up model. And example is the current state of reading... We are starting to see the effect of the top down model of the Fed Dept of Education forcing a changes from Phonetic to Whole Language, No Child Left Behind, and Common Core...

These changes were forced from the Fed on the states. There was some state involvement in the development don't get me wrong but it was a say something that spread naturally from the bottom up the Fed recognized it and then made it a standard. No this was some research, money, and lobbying (by big book, testing, and tutorng).

Me and you should be about the age where we just missed whole language reading. It used to be Phonetic teaching. You teach how letters sound and change forming words, then the rules for when they change and how they change, then build a vocabulary. (another bottom up approach). Whole language is the theory that kids have innate ability to read you just have to point them in the right direction. You teach them words, what they mean, how they relate to real life, and they will figure out the interaction of letters and sounds innately.  This gives you great gains initially for young kids to comprehend but those gains are surpassed by phonetical taught kids as they get older. It took us 30 years to figure that out, but because of the the Depart of Education in the mid 80's and 90's pushed for Whole Language the whole country had to learn that lesson hard. If it was only done in small areas and failed then it would've been less hurtful. 

Then we have No Kid left Behind and Common Core. Kind of the same thing. Looking to be more objective in our testing, evaluation, and improving actual transfer of knowledge. Taking small sample size of how things should work and then the Fed trying to make the whole country fit into that model. In the process they tied teachers pay to the testing. They also forced everyone to be more aware and reliant on standardize testing. (not kidding but big text book, testing, and tutoring lobby pushed for this). What this did was to incentivize teachers and schools to teach kids how to pass tests instead of conveying the knowledge and more importantly how to extract the knowledge as a whole from the subjects/texts. 

So instead of teaching kids how to read a whole book, analyze it's themes, map out the plot, look for text, metaphor, analogy, and subtext, the teachers switched to how to comprehend, extract the core thesis of many short articles, snippets, or chapters of text. Then how to answer multiple choice questions or how to write a short 5 paragraph answer based on those snippets. 

The result? Of Whole Language over Phonics, No Kid Left Behind, and Common Core... we have teens, young adults in Gen Z and Alpha that don't have the mental agility, stamina, and patience to read a whole book in week or 2. If you give an average class a page to read and some multiple choice questions their evaluation would probably follow a normal bell curve like a group of Gen X or Millenials would, give them anything longer and they fall off the graph.  

www.the-independent.com/news/ap-washington-paycheck-protection-program-donald-trump-joe-biden-b2237118.html
abbey1227

Capitalism!
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