Texans pay federal taxes too, and like everyone else they bristle at the idea of those dollars funding something absurd. So when a claim started circulating that Washington spent $3.1 million studying why people take selfies, it traveled fast through the same social feeds Texans scroll. It is the kind of story tailor-made to confirm what a lot of people already suspect about federal spending. But before any Texan files it under “waste,” the claim deserves the same scrutiny we would want applied to our own money.
This piece does not defend the spending and it does not dismiss the concern. It does something more useful: it looks at what the public record actually shows, explains why the headline number cannot yet be verified, and lays out how any Texan can check a federal research grant for themselves. The goal is to model the kind of evidence-based skepticism that protects taxpayers from both real waste and viral exaggeration.
Where the claim comes from
The figure traces to Sen. Rand Paul’s office, which published it in a new edition of his recurring Waste Report, released through the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in late May 2026. The claim spread quickly, picked up by media outlets and watchdog accounts, generating exactly the 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 independently verify the number. Paul, who has run the Waste Report for years spotlighting National Science Foundation grants he considers frivolous, has a track record of memorable targets. But this edition 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, institution, or award number. Each listing includes the total funding, the research abstract, the lead scientist, and the grant period. That transparency is the point: a taxpayer in Houston or Lubbock can audit a federal grant from a kitchen table.
Here is the catch. 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 researcher. That missing number matters more than it seems. Federal research is often funded through several smaller awards across multiple years, and how those are aggregated can dramatically change the headline figure. A single $3.1 million grant tells a very different story than five $620,000 awards that share a keyword. Without the ID, there is also no way to see how much went to indirect costs, the overhead universities charge on top of direct research, which at many institutions 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 hits 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 for representing molecules as text. It has nothing to do with front-facing cameras.
Both the chemistry work and any behavioral-science grants about photo-taking live in the same repository and share identical search interfaces. A keyword query returns them side by side. A staffer running a quick search, or a reporter under deadline, could easily blend the two into a single spending total. Whether that happened here is unknown, but the structural risk is real, and it applies to every keyword-driven analysis of federal research spending. It is the kind of error that turns a real number into a misleading one, which is precisely why the award ID matters.
What the history of these claims teaches
Past Waste Report cycles show how much context a one-line summary can strip away. David Scholnick, the marine biologist behind a famous “shrimp on a treadmill” study, pushed back publicly in a 2014 interview, explaining that his work was actually investigating how water quality affects the immune systems of commercially important shellfish, research with direct relevance to the seafood industry. The punchy description made it sound absurd; the full abstract did not.
That pattern is worth holding in mind for the selfie claim. Social-science research on self-presentation and digital behavior is a well-established field with applications in mental health, online safety, and platform design. A study framed as “why people take selfies” could be examining adolescent body image, social-media compulsion, or the visual cues that drive misinformation, topics with obvious public stakes. Or it could be exactly what it sounds like. The abstract would settle it, and as of early June 2026, no abstract, researcher statement, or NSF comment had surfaced to do so.
The missing award number is the whole story
For a Texas taxpayer, the honest conclusion is not “this was waste” or “this was fine.” It is “we cannot yet say, because the one document that would settle it has not been produced.” That is an uncomfortable answer in an environment that rewards quick outrage, but it is the responsible one. Real federal waste exists, and watchdogs play a valuable role flagging it. The way to take those watchdogs seriously is to insist they show their work, starting with the award number that anyone could then verify.
This is not a call to wave away concern about federal research spending. Universities do receive large overhead payments on top of direct research costs, grant totals can be aggregated in ways that obscure what was actually studied, and reasonable people can disagree about which projects deserve funding. Those are legitimate debates, and Texas taxpayers have every right to be part of them. The point is narrower: a specific dollar figure attached to a specific project should be backed by a specific, checkable award before anyone treats it as established fact. Outrage built on an unverified number does not make government leaner; it just makes the public easier to mislead.
The good news is that the tools to check are public and free. The NSF Award Search and related databases at Grants.gov let any resident look up a grant once they have the identifying details. The broader federal spending record is searchable too, through USAspending.gov, which tracks federal awards down to the recipient. A Texan who wants to know where their tax dollars go does not have to take a viral post, or this article, on faith. The primary records are a few clicks away.
Until the award number behind the $3.1 million figure is released and checked against those records, the most accurate thing anyone can say is that the claim is unverified. We will update this piece if the underlying grant is identified. That is the standard we would want applied to any spending done in our name, and it is the standard Texas taxpayers deserve here.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
