{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-one-small-step-waste-one-giant-leap-wastekind/", "One Small Step for Waste, One Giant Leap for Wastekind", "2016-10-04", "2016", "2016-10", "Republican", "Senate", "KY", "Rand Paul", "P000603", "www.paul.senate.gov", "paul", "https://www.paul.senate.gov/news/", "scraper", "WASHINGTON, D.C. \u2013 Today, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, chairman of the Federal Spending Oversight Subcommittee, released the latest edition of \u2018The Waste Report,\u2019 an ongoing project cataloguing egregious examples of waste within the U.S. government.\n\nWe all learned, \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind\u201d in school, but is that what Neil Armstrong really said during his 1969 moon landing? A recent study drew on two National Science Foundation grants, totaling more than $700,000 of taxpayer money, to find out why we may have heard something different than what Armstrong claimed he actually said.\n\nToday\u2019s Report details if they succeeded and reveals the intended purpose of the grants, which did not even mention Armstrong. You can find \u2018The Waste Report\u2019 HERE or below.\n\n***\n\nWhen Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, he uttered certainly some of the most famous words in human history: \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d Or did he? Armstrong said that he was misquoted by having an \u201ca\u201d omitted from his statement, claiming it should have been \u201cstep for [a] man.\u201d[1]\n\nQuite the earth-shattering controversy we have on our hands here. Nope? Not interested? Don\u2019t care? Well, maybe you will care about this: the National Science Foundation helped fund a study which brought together researchers from four major universities[2] to find the missing \u201ca.\u201d To explain the mystery, researchers even sought out subjects with dialectal familiarity to Armstrong \u2013 people from Ohio.[3]\n\nThe study drew on two NSF grants totaling more than $700k.[4] Though the research was just published this month, one of the grants came from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.[5] \u201cShovel ready\u201d indeed.\n\nSo, did they solve the mystery? Well, no. In the end, researchers believe that the speed at which one part of a sentence is said, relative to the rest of the sentence, affects identification of words like \u201ca.\u201d[6] Listeners in experiments did not universally miss the \u201ca\u201d and certainly not to the extent it was apparently missed by listeners of Armstrong\u2019s statement on the moon and in recordings. Thus, \u201c[t]hese results demonstrate that substantial ambiguity exists in the original quote from Armstrong.\u201d[7] Truly groundbreaking.\n\nSo, why did NSF think this study deserved your tax dollars? Well, they might not have. As The Waste Report has noted in the past, once a grant goes out the door, there is no further accounting of where that money winds up and how much goes to a given project.\n\nIn this case, the intended purpose of these grants was to help improve and understand communications for persons with conditions that may affect speech, such as autism, stuttering, and Parkinson\u2019s disease[8] \u2013 not what Neil Armstrong said on the moon. The grant synopses makes no mention of Armstrong, nor does the paper assert that he suffered from a condition that would affect his speech.\n\nSounds like NSF funds might be getting lost in transmission\n\n###\n\n[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/asset?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155975.PDF\n\n[2] University of Oregon, Ohio State, Michigan State, and George Mason University.\n\n[3] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/asset?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155975.PDF\n\n[4] NSF award numbers: 0847653 and 1431063\n\n[5] NSF award numbers: 0847653\n\n[6] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/asset?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155975.PDF\n\n[7] Ibid.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-08T21:04:55Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-one-small-step-waste-one-giant-leap-wastekind/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8615499828010798, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}