Federal government spends $4.6M on crab and lobster tails in a month: Report
The federal goverment has an apparent taste for pricey shellfish, chowing down on $4.6 million worth of lobster tail and crab in the final month of the fiscal year 2018, according to OpenTheBooks.com.
The use-it-or-lose-it spending spree last year racked up $97 billion of U.S. tax payer money on 509,828 contracts, an increase of more than 16 percent compared to the prior year.
“We looked at the year, it was $22 million spent by the Pentagon on lobster tail alone, over the course of the past four years on lobster tail alone it was nearly $55 million,” Openthebooks.com CEO Adam Andrzejewski told FOX Business’ David Asman.
Some of the additional wasteful government spending ran the gamut, here's a look...
- Workout and Recreation Equipment: $9.8 million
- iPhones and iPads: $7.7 million
- Musical Equipment: $1.7 million
- Golf Carts: $673,471
- Booz: $308,994
- China Tableware: $53,004
- Wexford Leather Club Chair: $9,241
Federal agencies scrambled to use what is left in their annual budget by September 2018 to ensure that Congress doesn’t appropriate less money in the next year.
“More than half of [the spending] was in the last week,” Andrzejewski said on “Bulls & Bears.” “Incredibly, one out of every ten contracts procured during the entire year was spent in the last week.”
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The spending spree totaled $53 billion in the final week of fiscal year 2018.
Openthebooks.com found the Department of Defense ($61.2 billion), the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion), and the Department of State ($4.0 billion) were among the top five agencies that paid 85.6 percent of all the contracts.