Throwback Thursday: Commerce Spent $9,800 on PR Firm
In 1980, the Department of Commerce spent $9,800 – over $36,000 in 2023 dollars – on a private public relations firm that, unsurprisingly, recommended additional spending on public relations.
Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, awarded the Department of Commerce his Golden Fleece Award for this totally unnecessary spending.
According to Proxmire, Commerce hired the PR firm to review and evaluate the department’s PR efforts. The firm was chosen without the normal competitive bidding process because Commerce felt the firm was “uniquely qualified” to handle this project. The firm produced a 324-page report, recommending that Commerce undertake a slew of new PR efforts that would have cost tens of millions of dollars.
While $9,800 may not seem like much, the department already employed a small army of PR professionals to do exactly what the outside firm was hired to do. Commerce had 112 employees responsible for PR efforts internally and spent $4.8 million on their salaries. Twenty-one of those employees, with combined salaries of $781,000, worked exclusively for the Office of the Secretary, the office that requisitioned the private outside consultants.
Sadly, this waste on PR continues to this day across the federal bureaucracy. Open the Books published an investigation in 2015, and found that the federal government had spent $4.4 billion over seven years on PR.
Questions about why the government feels the need to promote itself aside, it’s indefensible for the government to contract work with pricey private firms when the ability to do the work exists internally.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com
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