In June 1982, the U.S. Departments of Labor and Commerce gave $700,000 — over $2.2 million in 2023 dollars — to a non-profit that was supposed to teach minority students how to make T-shirts. But not a single shirt ever got made.
For this wasteful spending, Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave the two departments a Golden Fleece Award. He gave awards to wasteful and nonsensical spending, eventually handing out 168 Golden Fleece Awards between 1975 and 1988.
“Department auditors warned Commerce officials that the project was doomed to fail and fail it did,” Proxmire said then. “Not one T-shirt was produced for sale, not one minority youth found a job, but the taxpayer lost his shirt.”
The project was supposed to spur youth-owned and operated manufacturing enterprises.
But it failed. There were 76 trainees enrolled but none received useful training, the senator said. Of the 13 people who were supposed to have graduated, a majority didn’t realize they finished the program, most had been in the program for less than two months, and nine months after “graduation” none had found jobs related to their training.
Program administrators wasted taxpayer money by hiring the nephew of a Commerce Department official as a plant coordinator even though that position wasn’t in the grant proposal, and they hired other staff for plants at which no training or production took place.
They also paid for travel costs and phone bills of employees conducting private business, and paid more than $350 to buy T-shirts as presents for the board of directors and Commerce officials.
“This is an especially painful fleece since the goals of the program — to reduce teen unemployment and provide skill training — were so laudatory,” Proxmire said.
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