Let's Cut Some Spending: $75,000 to blast lizards with leaf blowers

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: $75,000 to blast lizards with leaf blowers!

The New York Post reports:

Harvard biologists turned a leaf blower, a wooden pole, and a lounge of Caribbean lizards into a $75,000 payday. The National Science Foundation, claiming concern about worsening climate-change-induced hurricanes, paid researchers to capture 47 anole lizards in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then blast the animals with leaf blowers. The scientists filmed the critters hanging onto their sticks for dear life in windspeeds up to 108 mph – and kept recording as they went flying. The experiment produced some hilarious YouTube footage, plus a theory that bigger toes help lizards survive hurricane-force winds.

Poor lizards.

Poor taxpayers!