Throwback Thursday: Department of Education Spent $893,000 on Consultants
In 1986, the U.S. Department of Education spent $893,000 – over $2.4 million in 2023 dollars – on useless contracts with consulting firms.
Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, awarded the Department of Education his Golden Fleece Award for this useless spending.
According to Proxmire, an undersecretary first directed that a $355,000 noncompetitive grant be given to a consulting firm that was judged to be unqualified to do the work required.
Staff raised concerns about this, but the undersecretary directed the grant be awarded anyway, Proxmire said. The staff was ultimately right, the work was useless, and the spending spree began.
Next, near the end of the year, $238,000 was spent for a firm to set up three regional conferences. But the task was never performed, and the money wasted.
In another year-end spending attempt, the department spent $300,000 to prepare job descriptions using a computer. That work was never completed either.
Both grants issued at the end of the year were examples of use-it-or-lose-it spending, where federal agencies spend the remainder of their allocated money so as to not have their budget reduced the following year.
The department said in response that they would do a better job of vetting grants to avoid waste like this in the future, but as Proxmire aptly notes, “Students this thickheaded should flunk. So should the Department of Education.”
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com
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