`Ask the football team' won't end wasteful spending -- March 19, 2015 column

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.

30

Stupid spending? You decide. -- Dec. 19, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Senator Tom Coburn is making a splash with “Wastebook 2013,” his detailed list of nearly $30 billion in wasteful federal spending projects.

The Oklahoma Republican has become a hero in some quarters for his annual report, revealing the wacky ways the government spends taxpayers’ money. 

Among the 100 projects he ridicules this year:  $325,525 for a National Institutes of Health study on angry wives, $914,000 to promote romance novels, $17.5 million in tax breaks for brothels in Nevada, and $3 million for NASA research into, in Coburn’s words, “the search for intelligent life . . . in Congress.”

Good ones. The report, released Tuesday, always makes for entertaining, if annoying, reading, although few in Congress pay it much attention. That’s because most of the bone-headed spending decisions are more complicated than they first appear -- and because career politicians know it’s better to give and to receive. 

Grateful constituents remember their elected friends, come election time.

Besides, one man’s trash is another’s, well, Christmas tree.

Coburn comes across as a Grinch who’s particularly vexed that the government helps Christmas tree farmers. He scoffs at the Agriculture Department’s Specialty Crop Block Grants that go to the Virginia Christmas Tree Growers Association and five other Christmas tree groups, as well as to the California Dried Plum Board, Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Association, Michigan Maple Syrup Association, and dozens of wine promotions, among others.   

In Coburn’s home state, the Oklahoma Pecan Growers used grant money to attend international trade shows, which they said helped expand their market overseas, benefitting the state’s economy.

Altogether, specialty crop grants totaled $50 million, which tells me the government is spreading a fairly small amount to reach a lot of farmers.   

Coburn called out the Agriculture Department’s Value-Added Producers grant program that gave Glenmary Gardens in Bristol, Va., $213,000 to expand processing and marketing of locally grown fruits and vegetables for jellies, ice creams and flavored syrups.  He also disapproves of free wine and cheese on Amtrak’s Auto Train.

I had no idea my tax money was promoting American prunes in Japan or a “USA Pear Road Show” in China, but that strikes me as more wholesome and sensible than other government endeavors.

Coburn, a medical doctor, concedes that some of the projects are OK. He questions whether they’re the right spending when we’re $17 trillion in debt.  

Much of the big-dollar waste, no surprise, is at the Defense Department, which is trashing $7 billion in military equipment in Afghanistan rather than selling it or sending it home. The rationale is that it costs more to transport it than to leave it. 

Coburn is retiring next year, and one wonders who in Congress, if anyone, will chronicle waste, although Coburn followed Sen. William Proxmire, Democrat of Wisconsin, whose monthly Golden Fleece awards hitting government waste made headlines from 1975 to 1987. Proxmire died in 2005.

Some tea partiers contend Coburn’s 177-page report is itself an example of wasteful spending.  How much staff time and money does it cost to produce a report with 930 footnotes?  Couldn’t he have done it with fewer pages and less flashy graphics?

They’re good questions, but don’t hold your breath for answers.  And that’s another problem with singling out projects as “stupid” and “egregious,” words Coburn throws around liberally. Everyone has a different idea of what’s wasteful.

It’s incomprehensible to me that the State Department spent $630,000 of our hard-earned money to buy “friends” and followers for its Facebook and Twitter pages.  Or that a million-dollar bus stop with wi-fi, heated benches and sidewalks in Arlington, Va., has a roof that barely protects against rain and sun.

The reality is that most of the wasteful projects in this year’s report could appear in the next one because of the inertia of federal agencies, the near total absence of congressional oversight and political support for spending.

“The reason it’s hard work to cut spending is because somebody’s ox gets gored,” Coburn says. “Somebody doesn’t get money. Most members of Congress are more interested in getting themselves re-elected than they are in fixing what’s wrong with the country.”

Economist Milton Friedman took a philosophical approach. “I say thank God for government waste,” he said in a 1975 interview. “If government is doing bad things, it’s only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.”

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30