In the world of government waste, there’s shrimp on a treadmill, and then there’s the F-35.

Both have become synonymous with the proverbial phrase “waste, fraud, and abuse,” though there’s one very important difference between the two: their cost. Even the most generous estimates of the widely mocked “shrimp on a treadmill” government-funded study put its total cost at $3 million over the course of 10 years. That’s not chump change, but, in the context of the federal budget, it’s also barely more than a rounding error.