A Squirrelly Waste of Money

Last month Senator Coburn released his Wastebook 2012, which highlighted some of the most egregious examples of cockamamie federal spending.  Included among the 100 wasteful projects was a $325,000 grant awarded to San Diego State University (SDSU) and the University of California, Davis to develop a “RoboSquirrel.”  If you’re not familiar with the concept of a “RoboSquirrel,” you’re not alone.  According to the Daily Caller, the purpose of this project is to observe and learn from the interactions of squirrels and rattlesnakes in the wilderness.  A reasonable person may likely think this objective could be accomplished by watching the animals interact on their own, but that’s just a silly idea. In order to get a real sense of the interactions, $325,000 in taxpayer money to build a RoboSquirrel is what’s absolutely necessary to simulate and “…mimic the way squirrels fend off snake attacks by rapidly wagging their tails.”…or so the researchers tell us.

In an attempt to justify this unjustifiable waste, SDSU assistant professor of biology Rulon Clark told The Daily Aztec, San Diego State’s newspaper, that “Support of this research program goes toward [the students’] graduate degrees and trains the next generation of scientists and engineers.”  Clark, who was one of the faculty scientists leading the RoboSquirrel project continued, “If you cut funding to basic science, you are cutting the opportunities of the student that can’t be taught in the classroom.”  His statement is certainly logical, to the extent that Taxpayers Protection Alliance would even agree, but here’s the crucial difference.  What type of funding are we talking about here?  The university’s own dollars padded with generous endowments from alumni – can’t forget the state taxpayer money – or federal dollars taken from taxpayers from across the country?  The difference is a critical one.

Universities can choose to spend their money as they see fit, assuming they remain accountable to their Board and other important stakeholders.  But when it’s a matter of receiving federal tax dollars to complete a project, everything changes.  In such a scenario, the researchers and more broadly, the university, are accountable to the taxpayers.  Before pointing the finger at the university, the real agent that deserves reprimanding for wasting taxpayer dollars is the distributor of the funds, the National Science Foundation (NSF).  To start, let’s look at how the National Science Foundation’s website describes itself and its purpose.  NSF is “an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 ‘to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…’”  The obvious question is how building a RoboSquirrel could possibly fall into this extremely broad definition.  The answer is, it doesn’t.  To be fair, let’s continue reading the way NSF describes its funding: “NSF also funds equipment that is needed by scientists and engineers but is often too expensive for any one group or researcher to afford. Examples of such major research equipment include giant optical and radio telescopes, Antarctic research sites, high-end computer facilities and ultra-high-speed connections, ships for ocean research, sensitive detectors of very subtle physical phenomena and gravitational wave observatories.”  It’s odd that this description fails to include RoboSquirrel as a poster child.

We don’t need a scientist or professor in academia to know that the RoboSquirrel project falls far short of the mission and objectives described by that National Science Foundation. The lesson this unfortunate waste of taxpayer dollars teaches us is that federal money should be spent on projects that benefit all citizens of the United States.  Such dollars should, without question, never be used to fund projects, which will provide negligible, if any, benefits to the broader population.  To be clear, SDSU is free to use its research dollars however it likes; if it finds studying and creating a RoboSquirrel is a project worthy of funding then that is great.  But that does not make it a project that taxpayers dollars should be used to fund.  Regardless of whether one thinks taxpayer money should be used to fund even the most basic scientific research, if federal dollars are used they should go to a project that will benefit the entire nation, not a niche constituency.