In 1983, the Coast Guard spent $1.1 million—worth $3.4 million in 2023 dollars—to construct a boat repair station at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina that sat empty and unused for a year after its completion.
Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave the Coast Guard his Golden Fleece Award for this ridiculous and costly mismanagement.
According to Proxmire, the Coast Guard decided in 1975 to build a station that could repair boats in bad weather. It was only projected to cost about $500,000, but the Commandant of the Coast Guard disapproved of this proposal, arguing it wasn’t needed.
Bureaucrats remained undeterred. They continued to demonstrate why a repair station was needed, arguing that it would not be costly, because they could transfer personnel from other stations there to do repairs more cheaply than the private contractors in the area.
The Coast Guard agreed to construct the station in 1979. After Congress appropriated $1.1 million to the effort, the station was ready for use by 1981.
Unfortunately, the brand-new station sat empty for months because the Coast Guard forgot to assign staff to work there. In the Coast Guard’s words, it “overlooked the fact that if you increase activity at a unit, you can expect additional staffing will be needed to do the work.”
This ridiculous mistake doesn’t instill confidence in the Coast Guard’s logistical capabilities, and proves just how unnecessary the project turned out to be.
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