Federally Funded Dad Jokes

“Did you hear the one about the world’s greatest watch thief? He stole all the time.”

But even that guy might be impressed by the sticky fingers of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC), a tiny corner of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that managed to pilfer nearly $75 million in taxpayer money last year to maintain, among other things, an official government repository of “dad jokes.”

It’s funny—but not in a good way.

The agency’s website is the source of the cringey joke above, along with other forehead-slappers such as “Why don’t you ever see elephants hiding in trees? Because they are really good at it,” and “Have you seen the new type of broom? It’s sweeping the nation.”

In fairness, the National Strategic Dad Joke Reserve (not the real name, sadly) is just one of the NRFC’s responsibilities. The agency’s website offers a list of fun activities for fathers and kids to do together, along with more serious stuff such as public service announcements about the importance of being a good dad and access to mental health resources.

But the NRFC mostly stands as an example of how even well-intentioned government programs can become bloated and wasteful. It was created as part of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act as a one-stop shop for various fatherhood-promoting grant programs administered by a variety of federal agencies. The Obama administration revamped the NRFC in 2010, turning it into “a multifaceted initiative to encourage fathers to become better parents” with a promise to “catalyze a new dialogue on fatherhood in local communities.”

What has the NRFC accomplished? It’s hard to say, and that’s seemingly by design. A 2018 HHS study found that “very few rigorous evaluations” have tested the effectiveness of federally funded fatherhood programs. The study pointed out that “none of the evaluations we analyzed” focused on whether those programs produced better outcomes for children, even though improving those outcomes was “the primary rationale for father involvement programs.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to promote good fatherhood, but good intentions don’t lead to effective spending—and the federal government is “comically ineffective at promoting behavioral change through social programs,” says Romina Boccia, who highlighted the taxpayer-funded dad jokes in her Substack newsletter, The Debt Dispatch, earlier this year.

Even if you’re a fan of dad jokes—or a practitioner of the art form yourself—this ought to seem like a tremendously silly way to spend tax dollars. That’s especially true with the federal government running multitrillion-dollar annual deficits and sporting a national debt that exceeds $34.5 trillion, which is no laughing matter.

When it comes to the importance of cutting spending, we can only hope Congress takes a lesson from the “guy that stayed up all night wondering where the sun had gone,” in one of the jokes from the NRFC database.

You’ve heard that one, right? It finally dawned on him.

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