Stimulus Funds African Genital Washing Study

On the heels of a scathing report exposing incessant waste in President Obama’s scandal-plagued economic stimulus, a news agency reveals that nearly $1 million in recovery funds have gone to a genitalia-washing program for uncircumcised African men.

If this seems like an inconceivable prank, just take a look at the public university study that received $823,200 in stimulus cash to encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling. Specifically, the taxpayer dollars will be used to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex. You can’t make this stuff up.

The money from the monstrous $787 billion program Obama promised would jumpstart the economy and put Americans back to work was distributed by the National Institutes of Health. The goal is to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa by convincing uncircumcised men to develop an effective after-sex, genitalia-washing regime. The aim, according to the publicly-funded study, is to evaluate the “feasibility and acceptability of a post-coital male genital hygiene procedure” among Africans unwilling to be circumcised.

If the African men in the study follow the “penile cleansing procedure” researches will hit Uncle Sam up for more money to conduct yet another study to determine if in fact the innovative hygiene regime is effective in hampering the spread of HIV infections. “If we find that men are able to practice consistent washing practices after sex, we will plan to test whether this might protect men from becoming HIV infected in a later study,” the grant says.

While this may seem like the most egregious of the many wasteful stimulus-funded projects, there are also many more. Just a few months ago a Senate report exposed that tens of millions of dollars have been unscrupulously spent on things like ant research, to study why monkeys react negatively to inequity, a “tunnel to nowhere” in Pennsylvania, state-of-the-art cell phones for low-income smokers trying to quit and fancy digital music players for high school students.

Previous reports have also documented tens of billions of dollars in outrageous stimulus spending, including $5 billion on a “weatherization” program to make low-income houses energy efficient, $3 million for turtle crossing in northern Florida and $10 million to renovate an abandoned train station that’s been shut for three decades. Additionally, about $20 million have been wasted on Obama-mandated road signs declaring that his disastrous recovery program is “putting Americans back to work” when in fact unemployment is at an all-time high.