By MARSHA MERCER
In March 1975, Sen. William Proxmire, Democrat of
Wisconsin, grabbed headlines when he bestowed his first Golden Fleece Award. His
target: “wasteful, ridiculous or ironic use of taxpayers’ money.”
Sound familiar? Some things haven’t changed in 40
years; politicians are still fighting what they deem ludicrous federal spending,
although few are as clever as Proxmire.
His first Fleece went to the National Science
Foundation for spending $84,000 to study why people fall in love.
“Not even the National Science Foundation can argue
that falling in love is a science,” Proxmire declared. Besides, he said, nobody really wants to know why people fall in love.
“I believe that 200 million other Americans want to
leave some things in life a mystery, and right on top of the things we don’t
want to know is why a man falls in love with a woman and vice versa,” he wrote,
adding that such questions are best left to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and
Irving Berlin.
A national debate erupted, with conservative Barry
Goldwater and three Nobel laureates coming to the researchers’ defense. Columnist
James Reston of The New York Times said that Proxmire, normally a sensible,
modern man who believed in government’s ability to help solve problems, must
have been kidding.
“If the sociologists and psychologists can get even
a suggestion of the answer to our pattern of romantic love, marriage,
disillusion, divorce – and the children left behind – it could be the best
investment of federal money since Mr. Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase,”
Reston wrote.
Reston identified a clash of two worthy goals that continues
today: We want to eliminate stupid spending but we also want to support
research that could help solve society’s problems.
Proxmire wasn’t kidding. His second Fleece in April
1975 took on a University of Michigan researcher who had received $500,000 from
three federal agencies to study how and why rats, monkeys and humans clench
their jaws.
The researcher sued Proxmire for libel. The Supreme
Court found the senator was not immune from suit; he settled out of court for
$10,000 and apologized to the researcher on the Senate floor. Proxmire’s legal fees, totaling more than $124,000, were paid by
the Senate. The researcher paid his own legal bills.
Proxmire stopped naming researchers after that, but
he fired off 166 more press releases announcing Golden Fleece Awards before he
left the Senate in 1989.
Over the decades, members of both parties in
Congress have crusaded against what they see as wasteful spending. Sen. Dan
Coats, Republican of Indiana, last month started giving Waste of the Week
awards, recycling items from the Wastebook that former Sen. Tom Coburn,
Republican of Oklahoma, issued annually the last few years. Coburn retired last
year.
Coats gave his Waste award March 11 to the National
Institutes of Health for spending $387,000 on rabbit massage research at Ohio
State University.
“Does NIH need to fund a study to determine the
benefits of massage by using 18 white rabbits from New Zealand that receive
30-minute massages four times a day?” Coats asked on the Senate floor. He
quoted an official at Ohio State’s Sports Medical Center who said, “We tried to
mimic Swedish massage because anecdotally it’s the most popular technique used
by athletes.”
“Why didn’t they just ask the football team?” Coats
said.
Actually, even though athletes often use massage,
researchers say they don’t know the mechanism of how massage improves recovery
after exercise and injury. That’s where the
rabbits came in.
Ohio State defended its project as “important
research designed to help address a key question: Is massage effective as a
medical treatment?” The answer could help millions of people who suffer medical
conditions that affect their muscles, the university maintained.
One thing is clear. As much as politicians love to make
fun of research that sounds frivolous, they rarely act to stop wasteful
spending. If they wanted to stop the appearance of grandstanding, they could
rely on the annual recommendations of the nonpartisan Government Accountability
Office to reduce overlap and duplication in federal programs as well as
improper payments.
Congress and the executive branch implemented only
29 percent of GAO’s cost-saving recommendations over the last four years. The government-wide
recommendations reach far beyond funny-sounding research projects.
To curb waste in government, members of Congress can
dust off GAO’s reports and start implementing the recommendations. Ridicule may
be entertaining but it won’t eliminate government waste.
© 2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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