Sen. Rand Paul says the federal government spent $3.1 million figuring out why people take selfies. His office published the claim in a new edition of his recurring Waste Report, released through the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in late May 2026. The document leaked beyond Capitol Hill almost immediately; by early June 2026, the claim had been picked up by conservative media outlets and fiscal-watchdog social media accounts, generating the kind of outrage the series is built to produce.
There is just one problem: as of early June 2026, no one outside Paul’s office has been able to verify the number.
Paul, the ranking Republican on the committee’s Federal Spending Oversight subcommittee, has run the Waste Report for years, spotlighting National Science Foundation grants he considers frivolous. Past targets have included NSF-funded research on shrimp running on treadmills and the gambling behavior of monkeys. The selfie edition follows the same playbook, but it stands out for a reason that has nothing to do with smartphone vanity: the public evidence behind the $3.1 million figure is unusually thin.
What the public record actually shows
The NSF maintains an Award Search portal where anyone can look up grants by keyword, investigator name, institution, or award number. Each listing includes the total funding amount, the research abstract, the lead scientist’s name, and the grant period. Linked databases at Grants.gov and the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics cross-reference many of the same records.
Paul’s office named a dollar figure and a research topic but did not include the specific NSF award number. Without it, there is no way to pull the official abstract, confirm the funding total, or identify the principal investigator. The committee page describes the Waste Report series in general terms and does not reproduce the full PDF or quote the grant language for this edition.
That missing award number matters more than it might seem. Federal research projects are often funded through multiple smaller awards spread across several years, and the way those awards get aggregated can dramatically change the headline figure. A single $3.1 million grant tells a very different story than five $620,000 awards that happen to share a thematic keyword. Without the ID, there is also no way to determine how much of the total went to indirect costs, the overhead fees universities charge on top of direct research expenses. At many research institutions, according to publicly posted federally negotiated rate agreements, those fees can consume half or more of a grant’s face value.
A terminology trap hiding in the search results
Anyone who types “selfies” into NSF search platforms will hit an immediate snag. The NSF Public Access Repository contains a paper titled “SELFIES and the future of molecular string representations,” in which SELFIES stands for Self-Referencing Embedded Strings, a concept in computational chemistry used to represent molecular structures as text. It has nothing to do with front-facing cameras.
Both the chemistry papers and any behavioral-science grants about photo-taking habits live in the same federal repository and share identical search interfaces. A keyword query returns them side by side. A congressional staffer running a quick search, or a reporter scanning results under deadline pressure, could easily blend the two categories into a single spending total. Whether that happened during the preparation of this Waste Report is unknown. But the structural risk is real, and it applies to every keyword-driven analysis of federal research spending.
Silence from the researchers and the NSF
As of early June 2026, no direct statement from the principal investigator, the research institution, or the NSF has surfaced in response to this Waste Report edition. The agency has not issued any public comment through its main communications channels, and no researcher has come forward to defend or explain the work.
That gap matters because past Waste Report cycles have shown how much context a one-line summary can strip away. David Scholnick, the marine biologist behind the shrimp-treadmill study, pushed back publicly in a 2014 interview, telling the news site Vox that his work was actually investigating how water quality affects the immune systems of commercially important shellfish. The punchy description made it sound absurd; the full research abstract did not.
Whether a similar gap exists here is impossible to assess without the original grant abstract. Social-science research on self-presentation, identity, and digital behavior is a well-established field with practical applications in mental health, online safety, and platform design. A study framed as “why people take selfies” could be investigating adolescent body image, the psychology of social media compulsion, or the visual cues that drive misinformation sharing. Or it could be exactly what it sounds like. The abstract would settle the question, and no one has produced it.
Political incentives pulling in both directions
Paul’s Waste Report is not a neutral audit. His office selects which grants to feature, frames the descriptions, and chooses which details to highlight. The series is designed to build a case for reducing federal research spending, and it has been effective at generating media coverage and public anger. That does not mean the underlying facts are wrong, but the framing is constructed to support a conclusion.
The NSF has its own institutional reflexes. The agency has repeatedly defended its peer-review process as the gold standard for identifying promising science, and it rarely engages with individual Waste Report editions in public. That reticence can look like stonewalling to taxpayers who want a straight answer about where their money goes.
The underlying tension is genuine and decades old. Politicians answer to voters who see a $3.1 million selfie study and reasonably ask whether that money could have gone somewhere more pressing. Scientists argue that basic research often looks absurd in a headline but produces real breakthroughs over time. Both positions carry weight, and neither side has a monopoly on good faith.
The $3.1 million claim still has no award number behind it
The NSF Award Search accepts queries by keyword, institution, or investigator name. Each result page displays the award abstract, total funding, grant period, and links to any resulting publications. The Waste Report archive sits on the other side of the equation. Matching one to the other would reveal whether Paul’s characterization lines up with the agency’s own description of the research.
Until that match is made, the $3.1 million selfie-study figure occupies a familiar gray zone: plausible enough to generate outrage, specific enough to sound authoritative, and just undocumented enough that no one can confirm or debunk it with certainty. The leaked report put the number into circulation in late May 2026. As of early June 2026, no one has traced it back to a verifiable federal award record.
