Sen. Coats tosses ‘hanger’ study on waste heap
Published 2:00 pm Thursday, March 10, 2016
- Sen. Dan Coats, R-Indiana, criticizes a study of "hangry" couples, funded by a $331,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, as wasteful spending.
WASHINGTON – Sen. Dan Coats, R-Indiana, is angry and not because he is “hangry.”
Coats was on the Senate floor Tuesday, displaying a photo of a voodoo doll, and blasting a $331,000 grant by the National Science Foundation to study whether hungry people get angry – or “hangry.”
The three-year study involving 107 married couples asked each partner to check their glucose levels before breakfast and at night. Partners were then asked to pin voodoo dolls up to 51 times, depending on how angry they were with their spouse.
People with lower glucose levels stuck in more pins.
“Are you kidding me?” Coats said later in an interview. “We’re spending money on this?”
In his last year in the Senate before he retires, Coats reflected this week, saying he regrets not doing more to reduce the nation’s deficit and debt.
But he doesn’t see anything meaningful getting done in the last year of President Barack Obama’s administration, he said.
So, he’ll continue to do what he can – through what an aide calls “small ball” – which is speaking in the Senate to highlight examples of waste pretty much every week that Congress is session.
His examples add up. Coats said he’s pointed out $157 billion worth of wasteful spending, usually in examples already identified by government auditors.
The $331,000 study of “hangry” people, he noted, cost the equivalent of seven years’ income for an Indiana family.
“I can walk out of here and ask the question and do the survey. Clearly, everyone in America can answer that question,” he said.
Coats said he imagined a grant evaluator waving a voodoo doll in the National Science Foundation’s cafeteria while laughing, “You’re never going to believe what this guy wants $331,000 for.”
“You cant make this stuff up,” he said.
The study’s author, Brad Bushman, a communication and psychology professor at Ohio State University, and the National Science Foundation defend the research.
“Regardless of what Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana says, we do need science to study such topics, rather than relying on hunches, intuitions, gut feelings, premonitions, instincts, etc., which can often lead us astray,” Bushman said.
Among other uses, the study adds to an understanding of factors behind domestic violence, he said. It found that lack of lack of self control, caused by low glucose levels, could contribute to domestic violence.
In a statement defending its grant, the National Science Foundation said a better understanding of aggression can lead to better strategies to curb aggressive impulses and behaviors.
But choices have to be made, said Coats, who has targeted other silly sounding studies in the three-dozen “Waste of the Week” speeches he’s given since last February.
He took to the floor in February 2015 over a $387,000 study funded by the National Institutes of Health in which 18 New Zealand white rabbits received 30-minute massages, four times a day, to determine if the therapy helps recovery times after strenuous exercise.
Others have had bigger costs.
Asked what the problem is, Coats said government agencies may “have too much money.”
In other cases, he said, “The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
In his first speech, last February,Coats highlighted how some people can receive both unemployment and disability payments – even though unemployment requires people to be available for work. Closing that loophole would save $5.7 billion over ten years, he said.
Coats served in the Senate from 1989 to 1998, then was out for 12 years when Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman at the time, asked him to run for the seat being vacated by Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh.
Coats said he agreed to run that year, in 2010, in part from distress over the “ticking time bomb” of the federal debt.
But during his first few years back, he said he watched as several efforts failed to come up with a long-term plan to reign in entitlement spending and bring down the deficit.
Seeing little prospect of Obama taking major steps on reducing the debt, Coats said he began making floor speeches, picking up the mantle for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, who retired in 2014. Coburn was known for publicizing what he considered examples of waste.
The talks have won fans among other fiscal conservatives.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said in a statement that Coats is a “a strong defender of taxpayers, a sharp-eyed fiscal hawk.”
Asked about Coats’ war on waste, the staff of Indiana’s junior senator, Democrat Joe Donnelly, noted that he, too, is focused on the deficit and introduced a balanced budget amendment last year.
In the interview, Coats mainly blamed the Obama administration for a lack of action but added, “We’ve all failed to come together to do something every member of Congress knows we have to get done.
“We keep postponing it,” he said. “… We always say we’ll deal with it after the next election.”
Kery Murakami is the Washington, D.C. reporter for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at kmurakami@cnhi.com