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It’s no secret that our policy makers are scrambling to figure out how to slow down the massive growth of our national debt, which at the time of writing clocked in at $16.25 trillion and counting.

The Department of Everything

If you ask Republicans how they would balance the budget the answer is easy: Cut spending in every corner of big government – everywhere except defense.

But Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, sees things a little differently from his colleagues on the right. He thinks the Department of Defense could save at least $67.9 billion over a decade by making cuts to DOD expenses that actually have very little to do with defense.

Think beef jerky. And red balloons. And peace through fish. Yes, fish.

On Thursday, Coburn released a report titled “The Department of Everything,” which looks at the “non-defense” spending that he says could save taxpayer dollars and reduce our deficit “without cutting any Army brigade combat teams, Navy combat ships, or Air Force fighter squadrons.”

The oversight report found $6 billion that went to non-military research and development, $15.2 billion went to education, $700 million went to alternative energy, $9 billion to grocery stores, and $37 billion to overhead, support and supply services.

But the strangest findings of the report come from the Pentagon’s expenses in research and development.

“The federal government will spend about $138.9 billion on research and development in 2012,” the report states. “The Department of Defense (DOD) will spend nearly $73 billion, which is more than the combined total of every other federal agency and department.”

Coburn isn’t convinced that we’re spending our money wisely, and after taking a look at the report, we aren’t either.

Here’s a look at some of the kookier places we’re sending our funds.

‘Koo’ Use of Slang in Twitter Messages Reveals ‘Suttin’

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Office of Naval Research funded an analysis of 380,000 tweets by 9,500 Twitter users in March 2010. Using the GPS locations of the tweets, researchers at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science looked at regional slang and dialects.

Here is what they found:

“Postings on Twitter reflect some well-known regionalisms, such as Southerners’ ‘y’all,’ and Pittsburghers’ ‘yinz,’ and the usual regional divides in references to soda, pop and Coke,” according to the study. “In northern California, something that’s cool is ‘koo’ in tweets, while in southern California, it’s ‘coo.’ In many cities, something is ‘sumthin,’ but tweets in New York City favor ‘suttin.’ While many of us might complain in tweets of being ‘very’ tired, people in northern California tend to be ‘hella’ tired.”

Coburn argues in his report that although this information may be interesting to linguists, the study of slang and dialect by the Pentagon is a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Pentagon Researchers Study Fish to Determine if Ignorance Can Save Democracy

Yes, you read that right. Researchers at the Pentagon and Princeton are studying the ignorance of fish in order to save our highly polarized nation.

The study looked at the color preferences of golden shiner fish to determine whether animals with “no prior knowledge or strong feelings on a situation’s outcome” will side with the majority or minority opinion.

They trained fish to swim towards a blue target while a “strongly ‘opinionated’ minority group” “driven by a natural attraction to the color yellow.”

The results found that the minority group won when uninformed individuals were not present, but lost when untrained fish added to the experiment sided more consistently with the trained majority. In other words, undecided voters are more likely to be swayed by the majority opinion of their community than a more outspoken minority.

In bold-faced type, Coburn writes:

“How is this study comparing fish to democracy and politics possibly linked to the defense of this nation? How can this study be considered as necessary to help our military fight and win the nation’s wars?”

Pentagon Raids Weapons Program to Develop Beef Jerky Roll-ups

The Foreign Comparative Testing program is cooking up a new brand of beef jerky that “will shock and awe your taste buds,” Coburn writes.

The FCT has spent over $1.5 million on its jerky which the Department of Defense describes as “a meat roll-up that can be consumed as a savory snack or used as a filling for a shelf stable sandwich.”

This is all well and good, but the Oklahoman points out that the FCT’s funding is supposed to go towards testing weapons and technologies for our soldiers.

DOD Hunts Ten Red Balloons

Playing off of the 1982 Nena song, “99 Red Balloons,” the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hosted a Red Balloon Challenge, a techno-treasure hunt during which participating teams explored “how the Internet and social networking can be used to solve a distributed, time-critical, geo-location problem.”

DARPA awarded $40,000 to the first team to find one of 10 red balloons hidden across the country.
The English version of the song is about two children who release 99 red balloons into the air, sending governments into red alert and triggering a nuclear war.

In a statement, Coburn said:

“I believe in peace through strength but we cannot be strong militarily unless we are strong economically. And we cannot be strong economically if we treat politically-sensitive areas of the budget as sacrosanct. At a time when our own military leaders are calling our debt our greatest national security threat we need to look at every area of the budget for potential savings. No part of the budget can be taken off the table. Achieving peace through strength, and getting our debt under control, must involve refocusing the Pentagon on its core mission.”

According to Coburn’s 73 page report, other areas of research and development include robots as playmates for children, the color of the first bird’s feathers, and a mobile app to tell users when to take their next coffee break.

Read the full report here.