Starting Foxtrot Yankee Company - Grants and Government Waste

Starting Foxtrot Yankee Company was a slog. It still is. Working a full-time job as a Business Development Manager for a new product in the US market, standard home responsibilities, and deciding to start a company is no small feat. I am not looking for sympathy, just stating fact. As a one man show to start makes it difficult, but not impossible. It’s a daily grind to get the word out, and it’s slow going.

Then there are the costs. We started out wanting to do something bigger with more products and more marketing to get in front as many eyes as possible, as soon as possible. Starting on a shoestring budget was an option, but the last one. For six months we investigated start-up grants, specifically looking for Veteran Small Business Start-Up Grants. There aren’t any. Nothing. The US Veteran gets overlooked at every corner. The VA is a waste of money. Too much bureaucracy, not enough common sense, and overall, it is a money pit that only causes more issues than it solves. Honestly, they rejected my application because “You make too much money.” Really? So even though I served, I need to be poor to get assistance for healthcare if needed (hearing aids cost a fortune and are not covered by our health insurance – and the hearing loss is due to being around jets and flightline equipment for years). How is that right?

All of that, and we couldn’t get any assistance (loans yes, but who wants to start off in the hole?) to get things rolling. It’s okay, really. We are happy to have started this on our own, with nothing that can be held over us later. Yes, ‘we are building this’, all without any assistance. Scary, yes. Difficult, yes. Slow, yes. Regardless, it is ours, and ours alone.

The only issue we now have is what we see every day in the news. The fraud, waste, and abuse of our government is absolutely incredible. So, there are no grants for veterans starting a small business, but you can waste money on:

• $600,000 grant to study “menstrual cycles in transgender men”
• $532,000 to “use mouse model to investigate the effects on cross-sex testosterone treatment”
• $523,000 for avocado marketing in Honduras
• $770,550 for cacao farming in Peru
• $1,509,200 for seed banks in Haiti and the Caribbean
• $630,725 for fruit marketing in Bolivia
• $930,811 for alpaca farming in Peru
• $364,500 to reduce social discrimination of recyclers in Bolivia
• $813,210 for vegetable gardens in El Salvador
• $677,342 to expand fruit and jam sales in Honduras
• $1.7M for the “China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study” at Peking University in Beijing, China
• $60M for “Indigenous Peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment”
• $74M for “Inclusive Justice” in Columbia
• $10M for “Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcision”
• $14M for “improving public procurement” in Serbia
• $7M on various projects studying magic
• $419,470 to determine if lonely rats sought cocaine at a greater frequency than happy rats
• $2.3M for the NIH to inject dogs with cocaine
• $75,000 in grants on a Harvard Study on lizards being blown off trees with leaf blowers
• And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on……

Frustrating! We have Vets living in the street. We have vets with PTSD, TBI, and so much more. They need help from us, but we fund so much other BS. Our representatives get the best benefits, they get good pay, they all end up making millions while in office, but those who actually put their asses on the line for our freedoms….well they get the shaft.

$5K was all we were looking for. That’s it. It might sound like a lot to some but look at that list above and tell me what it is. Chump Change. Perhaps we should have started an NGO (Non-Government Organization) to study the value of new home design and efficiency over old home designs. We could have gotten millions, maybe billions. Again, it’s okay though. We are glad we started without strings attached. No one can say “you didn’t build that.” FU, we did!

One last note. Where is PETA in all this. Look at the craziness with money spent on these ridiculous tests on mice, dogs, and other animals. Where is the outrage? Those poor animals. If it was a Republican giving that money to test on animals, I bet it would be all over the news and PETA would be up in arms…only its crickets from PETA now.