The federal government spent more on anti-obesity rap songs, a soap opera series about HIV, and a device to monitor how long hotel guests spend in the shower than Congress spent investigating the attack in Benghazi, Libya.
Democrats are very concerned that taxpayer funding went towards the investigation of the 2012 attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. They say the investigation has cost about $7 million.
"We are issuing our own report today because, after spending more than two years and $7 million in taxpayer funds in one of the longest and most partisan congressional investigations in history, it is long past time for the Select Committee to conclude its work," Democratic House members said.
A spending tracker of the investigation created by Democratic members of the committee showed a total $7,161,432 spent as of Tuesday afternoon.
The amount is less than the federal government’s investments in studies about the "relationship between gender and glaciers," a soap opera and instructional videos on how to put a condom on a cucumber, and research on male engineering students’ "microagressions" against women.
The National Science Foundation spent $412,930 on a study that published scientific results on the "relationship between gender and glaciers." The results concluded that "ice is not just ice," and instructed scientists to take a "feminist postcolonial" approach when studying melting ice caps and climate change.
The soap opera series "Love, Sex, and Choices" has received $3,134,199 from the National Institutes of Health for 12 episodes about HIV. One episode viewed by the Washington Free Beacon begins with a graphic oral sex scene between a woman and her ex, while a child plays in the other room.
The National Endowment for the Arts recently spent $20,000 for a play about "rape culture," and the Environmental Protection Agency has invested $90,000 in technology to track how long Americans spend in the shower when they stay in hotels.
Another National Science Foundation project has spent $548,459 videotaping male college engineering students while they work in labs to see if they are causing women to experience "microaggressions."
Finally, a joint project by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health has spent $3,541,583 on a series of anti-obesity hip-hop songs, such as the Barry White-inspired "Bake Don’t Fry" that urges kids to lay off the French Fries.
The above mentioned taxpayer-funded projects total $7,747,171, over $500,000 more than what Congress spent investigating the Benghazi terrorist attack.
While Democrats insist that no new information was gleaned from the investigation, the House Select Committee on Benghazi released its findings on Tuesday that included a timeline of public and private statements showing the Obama administration misled the public by portraying the attack as the result of an internet video.
"We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film," then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton said in a private statement to Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil on Sept. 12, 2012. "It was a planned attack—not a protest. . . . Based on the information we saw today we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this was affiliated with al Qaeda."
Meanwhile, in public Clinton, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, blamed the "disgusting and reprehensible" video for the attack.
The committee’s final report also found that the Obama administration never deployed the military during the attack on the American consulate, despite claims by then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.