What is a priority — or a “special interest” to use your terminology — to you may not be a priority for someone else. I’ll grant you, this study is perhaps not the most shining example of the usage of tax dollars, but it does have some value (and incidentally, we don’t know exactly how much of the funds cited actually went to this study, a conspicuous and likely deliberate omission to avoid undercutting Coburn’s indignation). But the minute you start trying to a la carte this kind of spending, everyone’s going to lose something they care about.