For the past 11 years, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has released his annual “Festivus Report” to air grievances. While the name is a reference to a Seinfeld episode, the report itself is legitimate, detailing what he believes were some of the most egregious examples of the federal government wasting our tax dollars in the previous year.

Since the start of the report, the dollar amount of the government “waste” he cites has grown significantly.

In 2015, it was a little over a billion dollars. By 2019, it was $50 billion dollars. The latest report for 2025 showed that the figure hit a cool $1.639 trillion dollars. It’s worth mentioning that a huge portion of that total comes from interest payments on the national debt, which Senator Paul now includes in his overall tally. U.S. taxpayers paid $1.22 trillion dollars in interest just to service the national debt last year. That is significantly more than the Pentagon’s entire budget—and given the fact that that money is literally going to nothing other than interest, there’s a good case to be made to include that figure in the overall wasted spending report.

Setting the interest payments aside, let’s go through nine of the most interesting examples of government waste from the report.

The U.S. Supreme Court just issued a decision that expands your right to appeal a federal prison sentence. Now, I’m sure most people reading this won’t ever become a federal prisoner—but, if you ever do, or if someone you know does, they will now have more rights given the fact that the court threw out a significant limit on federal prisoner appeals. Let’s go through the details together.

Measles, once thought to have been eradicated in the United States, is making a resurgence. The latest numbers from the CDC show that the number of cases reported in 2025 was the most in the past 33 years. Let’s examine where these outbreaks are happening, as well as why.