As the Free Beacon reports this week, the NSF is still doling out those ARP funds in large batches. But the "work" the money is going toward isn't even vaguely related to COVID in many cases. Would you care to hazard a guess what the cash is actually being used for? If you said "climate change" and "racial equity," give yourself a cookie.

Since January 2023, President Joe Biden's National Science Foundation (NSF) has spent millions of dollars on grants funded by the American Rescue Plan, Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus package. The grants have nothing to do with COVID, but they do fund studies on climate change.

The American Rescue Plan, which Biden said would bring "direct relief to families bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 crisis," sent $600 million to the NSF. The agency pledged to use the funding to "support groups of individuals and institutions most strongly affected by the pandemic." Three years after Biden signed the legislation, that money is still going out the door—through research grants that aren't COVID-related.

So where did all of this NSF money wind up going? There was $246,000 for an Amherst College study that looked at flood plains and how they have responded to climate change. The University of Texas at Austin received a grant of seven million dollars to "develop a learning environment that is welcoming to marginalized and minoritized researchers." More cash went to a study of "the structural organization, and changes therein, of a school of fish." Perhaps some of the fish had COVID?

It wasn't just the NSF handing out cash in this fashion. American public schools were given more than $1.2 billion despite their already bloated budgets not requiring it. Schools spent barely seven percent of that money on projects related to COVID control. As the Free Beacon goes on to remind us, many school districts wound up handing out the money to teachers and administrators in the form of bonuses and other perks. The Department of Transportation received more than $40 billion and God only knows what they did with it.

This is only part of a larger pattern that was seen with nearly all of the supposed COVID relief funding that was sloshing around. Huge amounts of it were immersed in waste, fraud, and abuse. Even some of the money that might have made its way to people who were generally hurting because of the shutdown was lost to thieves and conmen. The COVID-enhanced unemployment funding was pillaged to the tune of billions of dollars in fraudulent claims. The government has been attempting to track down and punish the thieves, but most analysts agree that the lion's share of those funds will never be recovered. No-interest loans and grants were doled out to businesses to keep them afloat with almost no tracking of those funds. Some were no doubt put to good use, but many applied for the programs and simply pocketed the cash.

File all of this history under the category of lessons we'd better have learned before the next pandemic rolls into town. Shutting down the economy was an unmitigated disaster. Closing the schools was unnecessary and had catastrophic consequences for a generation of children. All of that "free money" we printed to hand out as relief contributed significantly to spiking inflation rates. Virtually nothing about the pandemic was handled correctly in retrospect. And I can't shake the sickening fear that if a new virus gets loose, we're going to do the same things all over again.