A very expensive child health study run by the federal government is going "night-night"—without doing much of anything.
The National Institutes of Health's project, which was supposed to track 100,000 kids from before they were born through adolescence, was canceled last week after burning through $1.3 billion, the Bloomberg news agency reported Monday.
It was designed to study the effects of a range of environmental and biological effects on a child's health and development.
NIH Director Francis Collins pulled the plug on the study after becoming concerned about "administrative difficulties and the project's spiraling cost," according to Bloomberg.
In a post on the NIH website, Collins said the study "as currently designed is not feasible."
The story pointed out that despite being authorized by Congress in 2000, little work on the project was done besides a "small pilot study to test research methods."