As governments around the world are tightening the public purse strings to cope with the economic turmoil brought about by COVID-19, you might be shocked at some of the ways authorities have spent taxpayers' cash in recent years. From an experiment where researchers watched hamsters fighting to spending millions of dollars on faulty face masks to a giant squid, click or scroll through to see the astounding ways governments have blown public money.
All dollar values in US dollars unless otherwise stated.
Government figures live a pretty stressful lifestyle, so it probably doesn’t come as much surprise that they’re in need of a little wind-down from time to time. In 2016, it was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald that the Department of Parliamentary Services had been paying a yoga teacher AU$11,300 ($8.3k/£6.2k) to teach free yoga classes to MPs, which had been operating since 2012. Clearly, it's not just the federal budget that was being stretched.
In the UK, London’s Brent Council spent £12,000 ($16k) on a hologram at its HQ, simply to direct people in the right direction. In an article for the Guardian, Brent Council member James Denselow hit back at negative press coverage, saying the hologram was "a great example of how technology and innovation can save money", as the hologram cost was far lower than the cost of hiring a human receptionist.
America's National Science Foundation spent over $50,000 (£37.5k) to study the effects of sea monkeys’ swimming patterns on water movements. However, scientist John Dabiri said that the research showed the role that these animals play in mixing up layers of ocean minerals, arguing that these conclusions might have wider implications on understanding how animals get key nutrients.
For those of you who remember the online world of Second Life, launched in the early 2000s, you'll remember how companies paid for a space there. Even TV show The Office was present. And the Swedish Government got in on the action too, paying for the Swedish town of Malmö to create an exact replica of itself inside the world for a reported £75,000 ($118k).
Another part of the Canada 150 celebrations that raised some eyebrows was the Red Couch Tour. The CA$155,000 ($119k/£89k) federally-funded project did what its name suggested and saw a scarlet couch, pictured here in Yellowknife, travel the country to encourage Canadians to sit down and tell their stories. Artist Ela Kinowska said the tour allowed Canadians to have a valuable conversation about what unites them, while the Canadian Taxpayers Federation deemed it a waste of money.
The US National Science Foundation decided it was going to look into the gambling habits of monkeys because, well, why not. The aim was to look at the ‘hot-hand bias’ of monkeys and see if they had the same problem as human gamblers. Around $171,000 (£128k) later, the research found monkeys do in fact “love to gamble”.
Noto, a coastal town in Japan's Ishikawa prefecture, has spent ¥25 million ($230k/£165k) on a 42 foot (13m)-long squid statue. The money used to pay for the unusual statue came from the ¥800 million ($7.3m/£5.3m) emergency funds granted to the town for coronavirus measures. Many have criticised the amount spent on the squid, when it could have gone towards medical care services. That said, the Japanese government hadn't said that the funds had to go directly towards coronavirus relief and local authorities made the decision to invest in the statue in an attempt to boost tourism in the area, an industry that has been greatly impacted by COVID-19.
After the NCF had finished studying monkeys, it also decided to plough $331,000 (£249k) into a study which looked at whether hungry people tend to be angrier and more aggressive. This was tested by allowing people to poke pins into voodoo dolls as they become hungrier. If you’ve ever suffered from ‘hanger’, you can probably guess what the conclusion was. Poor voodoo dolls.
The US National Institutes of Health paid $387,000 (£291k) to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to fund a series of Swedish massages for rabbits to discern whether Swedish massages are helpful in recovering from an illness. The scientists found that rabbits that received 30-minute massages immediately after exercise recovered fastest, althought senator Tom Coburn wasn't impressed with the findings, including the example in his 2014 "wastebook" spending report.
The US Department of Agriculture gave the University of New Hampshire $700,000 (£623k) to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows. The conclusion? Cows emit most of their methane through belching, and a small fraction from flatulence. After including the study in his "wastebook" report of wasteful spending in 2010, scientists hit back at Republican senator Tom Coburn. John Aber, a scientist involved in the study, said: "This is a caricature of the research based on a few words or phrases for political gain. It was competitive. Much of the research was about how nitrogen, in particular, affects groundwater."
On the subject of animals, the National Science Foundation once spent almost $856,000 (£641k) to put mountain lions on treadmills, according to Ted Coburn's 2014 wastebook. However, in an article published on Live Science, the scientific community hit back at the experiment's inclusion, saying that the report over-simplified experiments and lacked nuance. In fact, the experiment didn't involve treadmills but involved attaching GPS-tracking collars to mountain lions in the wild. "NSF represents the only basic biological agency to conduct this work. I give them credit for supporting creative thinking to solve problems and taking risks in the face of politicians," said Terrie Williams, a biologist who conducted the research.
Feng Shui is taken very seriously in Hong Kong, so much so that buildings are specifically constructed to allow qi (also known as ‘life force’) to flow through them. Every time a construction project ends, Hong Kong residents can apply for compensation if they think it damaged their qi. As you’d expect, this happens quite a lot, costing the government a fortune. For example, in the past decade indigenous villages in the New Territories region have received HK$10 million ($1.3m/£968k) in public funding for feng shui rituals in their new homes.
In 2015, it was reported that the US Department of Defense gave a $2 million (£1.5m) grant to a team of musicians and researchers to develop robotic music computers which could perform a trumpet solo and play along with human musicians. It came shortly after the department complained it needed more operating funds, so you can imagine how well received the robots were.
In a somewhat unorthodox experiment, researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois received more than $3 million (£2.3m) in government funding in order to watch hamsters fighting. The high cost wasn't the only thing that was controversial about the experiment, though, as some of the hamsters were injected with steroids to see if drugged hamsters were more aggressive against those who hadn't been drugged. The research was put to an end in 2017 after pressure from animal rights group PETA.
In March it was revealed that the UK government had spent £2.6 million ($3.62m) on a new room at Number 9 Downing Street, London, where “White House-style” daily press conferences hosted by Prime Minister Boris Johnson's media chief Allegra Stratton were set to take place. However, the briefings have since been scrapped, and the media centre, which features three oak lecterns, blue panelling and several Union Flags, lost its purpose. That said, the UK’s Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has insisted that the renovations were "not a waste of money", as it is bigger than the previous press room used by the Prime Minister and would be used by future governments. Boris Johnson has since used the room for COVID-19 press conferences (pictured).
In 2009, the EU paid €7 million ($8.8m/£6.2m) for a real-life donkey to travel around Europe and blog about its experiences as it went. The project, which was meant to promote a "year of intercultural dialogue", was listed by the eurosceptic thinktank Open Europe as one of the top 50 most wasteful EU projects.
In 2017, the Australian federal government allocated an enormous AU$30 million ($22m/£16.5m) to television company Foxtel to boost its sports broadcasting, attracting backlash for the decision to bankroll a News Corp-owned pay TV company. The government refused to explain the move even after a freedom of information request from ABC news, while a spokeswoman for the government told Guardian Australia: "This was a decision of government, announced in the budget as part of the media reform package."
In 2007, Hugo Chávez, then president of Venezuela, had an ambition to “combat American cultural hegemony”, causing him to fork out $17.8 million (£9m) to fund a film project led by American actor Danny Glover about an uprising of enslaved people in Haiti. Almost inevitably, the film never actually went into production.
In 2017, the US government came under fire when it emerged it had spent $28 million (£21.5m) more than it had needed to on uniforms for the Afghan National Army. According to a report by Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Pentagon needlessly spent the money on creating uniforms in a forest-green pattern due to one Afghan official's preference – despite the fact that the country is 98% desert. In fact, the US had uniforms suited to desert landscapes which it could have used for free.
The UK government has been criticised over failures to provide PPE to medical staff at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Yet it emerged in August last year that the government also spent £252 million ($329m) on 50 million face masks for the National Health Service (NHS), only for the masks to go unused because they featured the incorrect type of fastening. The masks, bought from a Chinese supplier as part of a deal with investment firm Ayanda Capital, were abandoned because they use ear loops instead of head loops.
In 2012, the Italian Government had to pay a staggering €381 million ($434m/£339m) to the EU after it was discovered that a motorway scheme the body was funding was seeing money go into the pockets of the Mafia through fraud, fake contracts and invented 'roadworks'.
In the 1990s alone, the Japanese Government splashed out around $2 trillion on building new infrastructure, such as highways, bridges and tunnels. But arguably one of its least successful projects is Tokyo’s grandest ring road, which plunges through green mountains in a series of tunnels spread over 1.25 miles (2km) and cost rearly $1 million (£750k) per metre. It was designed to carry 50,000 vehicles every day, but in 2012 it was estimated to carry just 10,000.
The US Government introduced two income entitlement programmes as part of the 2014-2018 farm bill to protect farmers from dramatic hikes in prices. However, the programmes proved to be far costlier than anticipated and ended up costing the taxpayer $2.4 billion (£1.8bn) more than the subsidies they replaced.
IT mistakes have cost governments big money, and the UK government was guilty of a big one when it spent almost £10 billion ($13.3bn) on a new records system for the state-run National Health Service. The now-abandoned system was originally projected to cost £6.4 billion ($8.5bn).
Dubai is famous for its extravagant spending and one of its most infamous projects is The World – a man-made archipelago that quite literally depicts ‘the world’ through 300 islands laid out in the shape of the earth’s continents. Construction started on the project in 2003, but halted in 2009 when Dubai was hit by the global financial crisis, at which point the islands had already cost an estimated $14 billion (£10.5bn). Construction restarted in 2014, but the jury's out on whether they will ever be cost-effective.
A boundary between the US and Mexico has existed since 1853, but the controversial issue came into the spotlight following the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. Trump promised to build a 1,000 mile (1,609km)-long wall as part of his anti-immigration policy, and insisted that Mexico would be the ones to foot the $8-12 billion (£5.7-8bn) bill. By the end of Trump's term in office the project was not only overbudget, but the $15 billion (£10.8bn) eventually allocated to construction was taken from counter-drug budgets and military construction funding – Mexico did not contribute a single dollar to the work. And what's worse? The wall was never completed. As of January 2021, the Trump administration had installed just 452 miles (727km) of wall, but only 47 miles (75.6km) of that stretch were built from scratch – the rest was reconstruction of previously existing barriers. President Biden will not be picking up from where the Trump administration left off, having promised not to construct “another foot” of the wall while in office.
The US's F-35 aircraft have one of the most expensive weapons systems in history and their costs continue to rise. Despite being manufactured and flown in 2006, the F-35 wasn't used in combat until 2018 and, since then, it has rarely been used. That's despite the fact the total project cost a whopping $1.5 trillion (£1.1tn), almost matching what the US government spent on the entire Iraq war.