Ben Cline has no problem with the $90 million that Donald Trump is spending on a military parade in his honor.
Cline is concerned with, checks notes, the $32,000 that he seems to think we gave to Australia to spend on breakdancing last year.
“Yes – America gave Australia $32,000 for breakdancing. And this was the outcome,” Cline posted on social media on Thursday, linking to a video of the Australian Olympic breakdancer Rachel Gunn.
Another link from Cline attributed the discovery of this tiny amount of money supposedly going to Australian breakdancing to DOGE – Elon Musk’s widely discredited Department of Government Efficiency.
“This is what Washington wastes your money on,” Cline wrote.
Again, our feckless MAGA congressman has no problem with wasting $90 million on a military parade honoring a guy whose rich daddy bought him out of having to serve in Vietnam, but this $32,000, man, he’s on it.
Which raises the question: did we really give Australia $32,000 for breakdancing?
I’ve tried every Google search related to this that I can, and the only thing that I can find about America spending $32,000 on anything related to breakdancing comes not from DOGE, but from Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican U.S. senator.
Paul, that curly-haired scamp, issues an annual report highlighting wasteful government spending each December, and included in his 2024 report a line item detailing $32,596.12 spent by the State Department on breakdancing.
When I tried to verify that, I came up with a handful of news items highlighting cultural and sports diplomacy initiatives favored by former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
Digging deeper, I found a news release on the website for the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria highlighting a weeklong visit by American breakdance experts Macca Malik and Jacob “Kujo” Lyons last spring as part of the State Department’s Sports Envoy Program.
“Our Sports Envoy Program has emerged as an integral part of efforts to build on the strong people-to-people connections between the United States and Nigeria,” U.S. Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Joseph Zadrozny said, according to the news release. “The lessons shared by our Sports Envoys – communication, teamwork, resilience, inclusion and conflict resolution – are essential for leadership development, community building, equality and peace.”
If you dive into the entrails of the Rand Paul report, you see that the $32,596.12 that his minions decided was wasteful spending worthy of inclusion in his annual report included money for this week of breakdancing diplomacy in Nigeria, along with unspecified efforts at what the reports claimed were aimed at “enhancing Olympic breakdancing endeavors.”
Of note here: the Rand Paul report includes footnotes, and the linked footnote for the section in the report on breakdancing leads us to three grants – one for $16,591.72 related to the Nigerian outreach effort, and two totaling $16,004.40 that were awarded to Mistral-Est Association, which, according to its website, is “a professional urban dance company founded in 2004 in the Elsau district of Strasbourg,” in France.
Not Strasbourg, Australia.
You’d think you’d have somebody look this stuff up before tweeting about it, wouldn’t you?
Maybe I should be the congressman here.
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Chris Graham
