Waste of the Day: Throwback Thursday - Vietnamese TV Experiment
Topline: In 2011, researchers from Pennsylvania State University used a $1.3 million federal grant to install televisions and electrical generators in seven remote villages in Vietnam.
There are worse ways to spend foreign aid, but the generators were installed only so the villagers could be used in a scientific experiment about “the causal link between television and family formation and reproductive health.” Seven other villages were denied televisions so they could be used as a control group.
That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses.
Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname "Dr. No" by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn't stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.
Coburn's Wastebook 2011 included 100 examples of outrageous spending worth nearly $7 billion, including the money spent on the Vietnam TV experiment — which would be worth $1.9 million today.
Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com.
Key facts: The research project investigated the ways “television serves as a sexual super-peer” and “can become the most accessible and compelling source of sexual information” for teenagers.
The grant came from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health.
Half of the Vietnamese communities were labeled “treatment villages” and given televisions. Researchers planned to study them for three years and interview 4,200 people in that time.
When researchers later held interviews with teenagers to study the impact of TV access, one 16-year-old girl told them, “Television is very educational. Television has taught us how to kiss and do things with boys.”
Summary: The link between “television and family formation” may be tenuous at best, but the link between our government and ridiculous spending is not.
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