Half-Million WASTED While America Borrowed Billions

Trash bin filled with one hundred dollar bills.

Your tax dollars funded a half-million-dollar investigation into why chimpanzees fling their feces at zoo visitors and each other.

Story Snapshot

The National Institutes of Health awarded $592,000 to Emory University researchers in 2010-2011 to study why chimpanzees throw poop
Senator Tom Coburn featured the study in his 2011 “Wastebook” report as a prime example of government waste amid a $15 trillion national debt
Researchers defended the work as serious neuroscience, claiming poop-throwing reveals evolutionary clues about human speech development
The study found better throwers possessed enhanced left-hemisphere brain development similar to human language areas
The controversy highlighted an enduring clash between fiscal conservatives demanding accountability and scientists defending basic research funding

When Science Meets the Taxpayer’s Wallet

The National Institutes of Health signed off on a $592,000 grant to answer a question most people never asked: why do chimpanzees throw their excrement? Emory University psychologist Bill Hopkins led the research team, which involved brain scans, behavioral observations, and careful documentation of throwing accuracy among captive chimps. The timing proved spectacularly poor. America was borrowing 36 cents of every dollar spent while wrestling with a $15 trillion debt, and Senator Tom Coburn was hunting for examples of fiscal absurdity to spotlight in his annual “Wastebook” catalog of government expenditures.

The Senator and the Scientist Square Off

Coburn’s 2011 report placed the chimp study alongside other eyebrow-raising expenditures: $176,000 investigating whether cocaine makes quails more promiscuous, $10 million for a Pakistani version of Sesame Street, and $198,000 studying social media and happiness. The Oklahoma Republican positioned these grants as symbols of an out-of-touch federal bureaucracy frittering away money while ordinary Americans tightened their belts. Hopkins countered that his team’s work represented legitimate evolutionary biology. Chimpanzees are humanity’s closest living relatives and the only non-human species that throws objects with aimed intent, he argued, making their behavior a potential window into how human communication evolved.

What the Research Actually Revealed

The Emory team’s findings, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in November 2011, showed that chimps who threw more accurately displayed enhanced white matter development in the left hemisphere of their brains. This region corresponds to Broca’s area in humans, the neurological command center for speech production. Better throwers also demonstrated superior communication skills within their social groups. The researchers hypothesized that the motor control required for accurate throwing might represent an evolutionary stepping stone toward the precise muscle coordination humans use for spoken language.

The Disconnect Between Discovery and Dollars

Hopkins emphasized that chimps don’t throw feces for food rewards or hunting purposes. They throw to communicate aggression, establish dominance, or express frustration, particularly in captivity where their behavioral options are limited. The behavior represents what researchers call “high ordered” cognition, requiring the animal to plan, aim, and execute a complex motor sequence. Yet to taxpayers watching the national debt clock spin, the explanation rang hollow. The study became shorthand for the disconnect between academic research priorities and common-sense spending restraint during economic crisis.

Public Backlash and Congressional Approval in Free Fall

Media coverage peaked in February 2012 when CBS News and Money Morning featured the chimp study as exhibit A in billions of dollars of alleged federal waste. Public outrage simmered as Congressional approval ratings plummeted to 9-11 percent, historic lows reflecting widespread disgust with Washington’s spending habits. The NIH defended the grant through standard bureaucratic channels, noting that peer review by fellow scientists had determined the project’s merit. This response satisfied exactly no one outside the scientific community. The defense that experts approved the spending only reinforced critics’ suspicions that the entire system operated as an insular club spending other people’s money without accountability.

The Wastebook Legacy and Unanswered Questions

Coburn retired from the Senate in 2015, but his Wastebook tradition influenced how Americans view discretionary spending on scientific research. The chimp study cost represented a rounding error against the $3.8 trillion federal budget, yet its symbolic power endured. No policy changes traced directly to this particular controversy, but the case reinforced narratives about frivolous grants that persist in annual budget debates. The research itself stands unchallenged in primate cognition literature, neither retracted nor debunked. Hopkins and his colleagues moved on to other projects, their findings absorbed into specialized academic journals that few taxpayers will ever read.

The fundamental tension remains unresolved: should taxpayers fund curiosity-driven basic research into questions that may never yield practical applications, or should government-funded science focus exclusively on projects with clear, immediate benefits? The chimp poop study became a perfect test case precisely because it straddled that divide. It was simultaneously legitimate neuroscience exploring human evolution and an easy punchline about wasted money. Years later, the study survives as a throwback example of the perpetual struggle between scientific inquiry and fiscal responsibility, a reminder that not every question worth asking is worth $592,000 of borrowed money to answer.