Sen. Joni Ernst released a new list of dubious government spending Tuesday, questioning why federal taxpayers had to foot the bill for studies that trained pigs to play a video game or dolphins to use an underwater touchpad to try to tap out their thoughts.
Sen. Joni Ernst released a list of dubious government spending Tuesday, questioning why federal taxpayers had to foot the bill for studies that trained pigs to play a video game or dolphins to use an underwater touchpad to try to tap out their thoughts.
She also dinged the National Endowment for the Humanities for a $400,000 grant to the National Comedy Center so it could display documents from comics Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The budget is largely symbolic, and Republicans are pondering whether to craft their own version or instead focus on the actual spending bills, due by Sept. 30, that fund the government’s programs.She said Congress has been criticizing big spenders for years, but it never seems to produce results. A law from a decade ago requiring the government to compile a list of every program it runs isn’t being followed.
“While our pigs were nowhere near as competent as monkeys and chimpanzees, what’s really cool is that they could do the task to any degree,” Ms. Croney said in a Purdue press release detailing her work. “And that they were actually able to overcome the major conceptual hurdle of understanding that their manipulation of the joystick was having an effect elsewhere, and that controlling that effect is what elicited a reward is the thing that I find really remarkable.
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