Let's Cut Some Spending: $60,000 to study chimpanzees and climate change

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: $60,000 to study chimpanzees and climate change!

From the National Endowment of the Humanities:

Research and writing leading to a book on the social dimensions of rapid climate change among six villages and two chimpanzee communities in Sierra Leone.

This book project argues that the primary issue humans and other species face on a planet ravaged by climate change is more than a problem to be solved by science; it is about the ability to know one’s self, and thus one’s place in the world. By focusing on the lives and worlds of six villages, two chimpanzee communities, disappearing forest and dying farmland in Sierra Leone, West Africa, I argue that surviving in climate change is, at its core, a trans-species philosophical question, for science cannot create a technical fix for the inability to be at home in the world.

Whatever problems exist in this world, American taxpayer dollars were never supposed to be the solution to all of them.

Monkeying around with our money. Literally.