In 1986, the Department of Agriculture gave $1.1 million — over $3 million in 2023 dollars — to the contractor running its Food and Nutrition Service for low-income hungry children, who spent it on covering their losses instead of feeding needy kids.
For this wasteful spending, Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave the Food and Nutrition Service a Golden Fleece Award in 1983. He gave awards to wasteful and nonsensical spending, eventually handing out 168 Golden Fleece Awards between 1975 and 1988.
Auditors in 1981 found the private company that had the contract to feed hungry children wasn’t operating properly. “The multitude of problems,” as Proxmire put it, included that “the private firm’s accounting system was a joke, and federal money was being spent without a paper trail to show who got it and why.”
This issue was also spotted in 1979. The auditors recommended that the Department of Agriculture “immediately help the company improve its management, or failing that, terminate the contract,” Proxmire described.
But the Food and Nutrition Service acted as typical bureaucrats in delaying and passing the buck, saying to watch for improvements in next year’s audit.
In 1981, the auditors found that $71,000 in federal dollars had been used to pay the company’s bills, and by 1985 that had grown to $1.1 million. Later that year, the company declared bankruptcy.
“Now the taxpayers will be standing in line in bankruptcy court to see if any of their money can be recovered,” Proxmire said.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com
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