Amidst the Ebola crisis, the government’s premier health agencies are burning their taxpayer funded budgets on wasteful programs faster than drunken monkeys. Based on a recent $3.2 million NIH study focused exclusively on getting monkeys drunk, that’s an analogy researchers should readily understand.

That’s not the story that is getting told by journalists. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are busy leveraging the Ebola crisis to demand more taxpayer dollars from Congress with the media's help.

The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein appeared on “NOW with Alex Wagner” Oct. 14, to give the big government side of the issue. “I interviewed the director of NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, and his point to me was that a 10-year slide, not just a two- or three-year slide, a 10-year slide in research funding had set that institution back in terms of its study of vaccines for Ebola,” said Stein. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tried to put the blame on the GOP-run House of Representatives, asking that same day, “Is Congress doing enough.”

Even The Washington Post called the left’s argument blaming budget cuts on the GOP “absurd.”

A bigger issue has been the media’s unwillingness to point to wasteful spending at both NIH and CDC. The two award about 64,000 research grants annually with little incentive for responsibly spending under “secretive, autocratic and unaccountable” leadership, according to a former health official.

Many of these taxpayer-funded studies are a combination of absurd, like spending $181,406 getting Japanese quail high on cocaine, and downright offensive, like one project costing $544,188 studying how to convince young girls to get the HPV vaccine. Surely, these two agencies could find ways to run their operations more efficiently. By way of comparison, the combined budgets the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, FBI, DEA and Secret Service came to nearly $1 billion less than the NIH and CDC combined budgets.

If NIH and CDC are still having trouble coming up with ways to fund their fight against Ebola, here is a list of 15 wasteful programs totaling $15,135,574,669.00 where they could have saved: