The Fulton Mall in downtown Fresno, Calif., one of the first outdoor malls ever built, opened to fanfare and great optimism in 1964. Montgomery Ward's, one of the mall's anchor stores, moved out in 1970. To paraphrase Louis XV, "Après Montgomery Ward's, le déluge." Today the "ghost mall" suffers years of maintenance neglect, evident in its broken fountains, crumbling sculptures and overgrown shrubs. Office buildings on the mall are 71 percent vacant. The city's solution: use $16 million from the U.S. DOT to build a road through the mall in an attempt at revitalization. No Fresno general fund money
will be used.

Saltmarsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) is known to grow up to 7 feet tall, but how fast does it grow? The Department of Interior's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to know, and is paying people a total of $10,000 to watch grass grow. Watching grass grow is number 11 on the Wastebook 2014 list. The numbers bear no relationship to the amount spent. Watching grass grow is quite reasonably priced compared to many of the book's 100 government funding examples.

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn's annual ranking of the government's top-100 worst examples of government waste is out. Wastebook 2014 presents "100 silly, unnecessary and low-priority projects," and "exposes Washington's upside down priorities that tally up to $25 billion," writes Sen. Coburn in the foreword.

Among the silly research dollars allotted: Swedish massages for rabbits ($387k); teaching mountain lions to walk on a treadmill ($856k)"?u"Study of mountain lion energetics shows the power of the pounce"; and our favorite"?u$331,000 spent to study how often 107 couples stick pins in voodoo dolls to represent anger toward their spouses when feeling angry/annoyed/peeved from lack of food (hungry + angry="hangry").

Those research dollars are small potatoes, however, compared to the nonresearch funding: $146 million in subsidies for sports stadiums; nearly $40 million in administrative pay leave for 10,000 Social Security Administration (SSA) employees (SSA employs 67,000) out for 10 days or more during the first six months of the year; and $1 billion the Pentagon is spending to destroy $16 billion in over purchases of military-grade ammunition, just to name a few.