Golden Fleece Award

The Golden Fleece Award is presented to those public officials in the United States whom the judges feel waste public money.

Established in 1975 by former U.S. Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin), and issued until 1988, it was revived by the Advisory Board of the Taxpayers for Common Sense in 2000. Its name is a tangential reference to the Order of the Golden Fleece, and a play on the transitive verb to fleece, as in charging excessively for goods or services.

Award winners included:

• Bureau of Land Management.
• MIT, for the Aspen Movie Map.
• NASA's SETI program for the scientific search for extraterrestrial civilizations, although he backpedaled after being visited by Dr. Carl Sagan.
• Paul Ekman's research that led to the development of the Facial Action Coding System.
• National Park Service.
• Federal Aviation Administration for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the "length of the buttocks" and how their knees were arranged when they were seated.
• National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded project by psychologist Harris Rubin for $121,000, on developing "some objective evidence concerning marijuana's effect on sexual arousal by exposing groups of male pot-smokers to pornographic films and measuring their responses by means of sensors attached to their penises, in 1976.
• National Science Foundation for spending $84,000 on a study on love.
• ......
...

Read More