Hey, Elon — Take a Chainsaw to THIS

Congratulations, taxpayers of America. Last year you spent more than $15 million on [checks notes] advanced concepts in yarn.

Courtesy of DataRepublican (small r) — a data-crunching genius on X — there's now a searchable, online database of federal grants to nonprofits and NGOs. "Ever wonder exactly which government grants fund nonprofits? Now you can know—because I’ve cracked the code," DataRepublican explained in her X announcement on Monday. "Unlike older tools that only sift through nonprofit 990s (which don’t directly show government dollars), I’ve mined the USASpending database to create fuzzy matches between nonprofits and their linked government grants."

She set it up so you can search by keyword, recipient, funding agency, and much more. Or you can do what I did this morning and be a jerk about it. I thought, "What is the most boring thing in the world and how much taxpayer money is Washington giving away on it this year?"

"Yarn," I immediately decided. "Yarn is the most boring thing in the world." To me, that is — knitters, please take no offense. I'm sure you'd find my collection of Polish LEGO-knockoff WWII warships boring as heck, too.

As it turned out, Americans — unbeknownst to 99.99% of us, I'm sure — will spend $16,500,001 on three yarn-related projects this year. The bulk of it, an even $15 million, went to something called The Industrial Commons on NSF engines.

The grant request explains: "NSF ENGINES: NORTH CAROLINA TEXTILE INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABILITY ENGINE -THE NSF ENGINES AWARD TO THE NORTH CAROLINA TEXTILE INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABILITY ENGINE WILL ADVANCE OUR NATION'S CAPACITY FOR INNOVATION IN TEXTILES THROUGH A LENS OF ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY AND WITH AN EYE TOWARD CIRCULARITY, POSITIONING THE NSF ENGINE AS A GLOBAL LEADER IN THIS SECTOR."

It goes on like that for almost 1,200 words, and please forgive the all-caps but that's how these things are submitted, it seems.

Anyway, a little digging revealed that NSF refers to the North Carolina Textile Innovation and Sustainability Engine, funded by the National Science Foundation. The program "aims to revolutionize the textile industry by promoting sustainable practices and fostering innovation," according to another summary. I'm not sure if they're actually doing any of this through "a lens of environmental sustainability and with an eye toward circularity (???)" or whether they just plugged in a bunch of buzzwords to please folks in the NSF who are totally into environmental sustainability and circularity. But it's probably the latter.

What I am certain of is that if the NFS will prove so innovative, then it's also going to be immensely profitable — and in need of ZERO of your or my tax dollars to make it happen.

There was another grant of $500,001 to the University of Minnesota for "CAREER: DESIGN AND PROCESSING OF MULTIFUNCTIONAL SHAPE MEMORY ALLOY MICROFIBER YARNS AND TEXTILES WITH TAILORABLE MECHANICAL PERFORMANCE." I guess $500,001 is what you apply for when your idea is obviously worth more than a mere half-million of other people's dollars but you can't quite justify a million. Amateurs.

And that's just what we're spending on yarn this year. We're also spending a quarter of a billion dollars — $242,055,394.28 to be exact — on various studies involving saliva.

My advice to Elon Musk and the DOGE boys is this: Search for grant requests using the letter E and zero them out.