One of Republicans’ classic attacks on government goes like this: Scroll through the list of government grants to find the ones that sound silliest—usually some kind of scientific research—and hold hearings where you hold up the result, mugging to the camera, pretending to be outraged about the price. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has been doing this for years, and Elon Musk has joined in on X more recently.

Invariably, these attacks are either grotesque misrepresentations of the research, or a basic misunderstanding of science itself. Musk repeated claims that the government had spent millions “to spray alcoholic rats with bobcat urine,” but this turned out to be a study into why people with PTSD—like veterans—often develop alcohol use disorder.

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Even studies that do sound legitimately silly can often lead to spectacular results, because a scientist doesn’t know what she is going to find before she looks. It would be easy to guffaw at government grants for, say, injecting Gila monster venom into guinea pig pancreases to see what happens—except when government scientists at the VA and NIH did this back in the 1980s and ’90s, they hit upon the key ingredient in GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic.

That said, the fact that Musk and Paul are liars or ignorant or hypocrites or all three does not mean it is impossible for a government contract to be a waste of money—and even ordinary contracts illustrate an administration’s priorities. We have therefore trawled through the federal spending database to see if we could find any instances of waste, fraud, and abuse.

There have been 24 contracts awarded over the last 12 months that cost American taxpayers more than $1 billion.

Find them we did. The Trump administration is spending billions and billions of dollars on building a pointless wall on the border with Mexico, kidnapping and deporting immigrants, and turning debt collectors loose on student debtors—all while slashing programs to provide the American people with food and health insurance.

It’s important to be clear about scale here. The U.S. federal government is immense, and anything less than a billion dollars barely scratches the $5.23 trillion that was collected in tax revenue last year, much less the $7.01 trillion it spent. The biggest new contracts over the last 12 months went to weapons and construction companies; war and lunatic xenophobia are reliably the big sources of spending in a Trump presidency. The single largest awards were up to $4.7 billion for Boeing to send 96 new Apache attack helicopters to Poland, two to Egypt, and eight to Kuwait; up to $3.4 billion to Raytheon for missiles; and up to almost $2 billion to Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. and $1.7 billion for Southwest Valley Constructors to build Trump’s wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

By the same token, Medicaid plus Obamacare funding is many times larger than ICE’s entire budget, and those programs were cut deeply in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Some ten million people are projected to lose their health insurance. Yet when asked about such problems last month, Trump refused point-blank to acknowledge the costs of the cuts. “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” he said. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things … We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”

At any rate, all told, at time of writing there have been 24 contracts awarded over the last 12 months that cost American taxpayers more than $1 billion. More than half of them were for war machines and Trump’s wall.

But there is still a great deal of useful information in the smaller contracts. Take Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whose most recent job was as a nominal journalist working for Fox News. One would think that among his few useful abilities would be experience in gauging public sentiment, particularly given that there is a cottage industry of conducting, publishing, and monitoring public opinion polls. Instead, he is actively soliciting for a contractor to provide an artificial intelligence–driven “news monitoring service” so he can judge public sentiment. Curious! But perhaps he is just being extra careful, given that he spent up to $23.3 million on a marketing strategy to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “U.S. Department of War,” which failed because nobody calls it that. And in case you’re worried whether he still has his fingers in the media game, he also directed up to $127.4 million in “national media/talent and furnishings” to the admen at DDB Chicago for “national media purchasing and placement activities, planning, reporting, maintenance, and all associated activities.”

Then there is student debt collection. Thanks to some odd legislative history, the government owns almost all American student debt. President Biden attempted to stop the endless increase in the student debt total by setting up a system of forgiveness, under which people would pay a percentage of their income for a set period (usually 10 to 20 years), after which any balance would be written off. The right-wing Supreme Court majority blocked that system as an outrageous abuse of executive authority.

Now, the Trump administration is spending big to extract as much as possible from student debtors. Nelnet Servicing has pocketed a $205.3 million contract for student debt servicing; Maximus Education has one for $166.2 million that can increase to $377.7 million. Coast Professional and Continental Service Group have contracts, both at $8 million, that can be increased to $23.8 million, to set up a pilot program for doing debt collection on student debtors.

That focus on revenue is particularly marked given how Republicans have slashed funding at the IRS, and practically gutted Biden’s special fund for auditing rich people. When it comes to making the top 1 percent pay what they owe, Republicans are defunding the tax police. But when it comes to squeezing as much blood as possible from the student debtor stone, they spare no expense.

Palantir Gets an Initial $3.9 Million to Spy on Federal Workers

Then there are those profiting from ICE’s mass kidnapping operation. MVM got a contract for $62 million for ICE’s “unaccompanied alien children safety verification initiative.” SNA International got a noncompete contract of up to $6.2 million to conduct DNA tests at ICE field offices to verify people’s biological relatives, though it does not indicate whose, on top of previous payments of $8.6 million. Clearview AI got up to $9.2 million to provide facial recognition software to DHS. New Tech Solutions got $722,000 to provide Kojak fingerprint scanners to ICE.

Finally, there are various toys and costumes. BMW is getting $2.5 million to make armored vehicles for the State Department. Lenco Industries got a $4.8 million contract to deliver Bearcat armored vehicles to ICE, presumably in case they run into any nurses or mothers. Workwear Outfitters got $1.4 million to provide Enforcement and Removal jackets, plus $1.2 million for ICE parkas, $1.2 million for ICE/ERO uniforms, and $599,680 for winter jackets for ICE. Atlantic Diving Supply also got $551,772 to provide body armor for the agency. The FBI is actively searching for a company that can provide embroidery and silk screening.

Last but not least, there is DHS and its ever-increasing spending on ornaments and decorations for immigration thugs. At the moment, ICE is soliciting bids for a contract to provide a plastic badge for its agents. OK, fine. But before then, DHS spent more than $2.1 million on badges and decorations for ICE and CBP agents, including $1.3 million for new ICE agent badges alone so they could wear something shiny while “performing law enforcement operations and investigations,” or in common parlance, mass deportation raids that are terrorizing immigrants and citizens alike. That is just one of dozens of disclosures showing how the government is spending our taxes on clothes and baubles. In February, the Department of Defense spent $304,750 on a “decoration set.”

Again, spending a few million dollars to provide a fancy wardrobe for ICE officers so they can do operator cosplay when they’re out tearing children out of the arms of their screaming mothers is no great shakes in the context of the federal budget. But it tells you what this administration cares about—and it’s not you or me.

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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07.

Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs.