A Democratic Senator Spent Thirteen Years Handing Out Awards for Waste

Let me tell you about the best idea in the history of congressional oversight, and it came from a Democrat. Every month, for thirteen years, a United States Senator from Wisconsin stood up, picked a federal program that had spent your money on something ridiculous, and gave it an award. Not a medal. A joke, carefully researched, delivered with a straight face and a press release, aimed squarely at the one thing Washington fears more than a budget cut: being laughed at in the local paper.

Nobody ever filibustered a punchline. That is why it worked. And the fact that its inventor was a liberal Democrat is exactly why every conservative should study it, because waste is not a partisan vice. It is the natural condition of money that belongs to somebody else.

Who he was

William Proxmire was born in Illinois in 1915, studied at Yale and Harvard, and moved to Wisconsin, where he won election to the Senate in a special election in August 1957 to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Joseph McCarthy. He was a Democrat, he was reelected several times, and he served until January 1989. He chaired the Senate Banking Committee and held a seat on the Appropriations Committee, which is the committee where money is actually allocated.

He was an unusual figure in a body that likes its customs. He was a fiscal hawk in a party that was not always one. He voted against a number of spending proposals popular in his own party, he opposed government subsidies for big projects, and he made a name for himself by refusing to spend what politicians usually spend. He was famous for running campaigns on almost nothing, and for a streak of consecutive roll-call votes that ran past ten thousand without a miss, from 1966 to 1988. What is not in doubt is that he made fighting waste his signature and that the voters of Wisconsin kept electing him for it.

The first award

In 1975 Proxmire announced the first Golden Fleece Award. The name was a play on the myth of Jason and the Argonauts and a pun on fleecing the taxpayer. The first recipient, as the record has it, was the National Science Foundation, for funding a study on why people fall in love, at a cost reported at about $84,000. The objection was not that love is unworthy of study. It was that the taxpayers of a country with serious problems were being asked to pay for research whose results, in his view, nobody needed the government to purchase.

Whether one agrees with his judgment about a given grant is a separate matter, and some of his targets were arguably worthy projects. Scientists were quick to say so. But the format was brilliant, and the logic of it is worth stating:

1. Pick a specific item. Not "the budget" but a named grant with a dollar figure.
2. Describe it in plain words. No jargon, no abstraction, a sentence a voter could repeat at dinner.
3. Name the agency that paid. Responsibility has an address.
4. Do it every month. A single outburst is forgotten, a steady drip is a reputation.
5. Be funny, not furious. A joke invites the audience to agree, and anger invites them to take sides.

The awards ran from 1975 to 1988, so thirteen years in all, and they spread across the government: defense procurement, research grants, travel budgets, public relations offices, studies of studies. Agencies came to dread the monthly announcement, and some began to review their own spending with an eye to whether it would survive being described in a single sentence. That is the real effect of the award. It did not cancel every wasteful program. It changed what administrators were willing to sign when they imagined the headline.

The lawsuit

Every good idea draws a counterattack, and this one drew a lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court. It is worth knowing, because it tells us where the constitutional line falls.

Ronald Hutchinson was a research behavioral scientist whose studies of emotional behavior in animals, including jaw-clenching as a measure of aggression, had been funded by the federal government. In April 1975 Proxmire gave him the Golden Fleece Award, and the speech called the research a waste of taxpayer money. Hutchinson sued for defamation. He argued that the award and the press materials that accompanied it had damaged his reputation and his career.

Proxmire's defense was constitutional. Article I, Section 6, Clause 1 says that Senators and Representatives "shall not be questioned in any other Place" for "any Speech or Debate in either House." This is the Speech or Debate Clause. It exists so that legislators can say what they think on the floor and in committee without fear of being sued or prosecuted by the executive or a hostile court. It has deep roots in the English struggle between Parliament and the Crown. Proxmire argued that his awards, his statements on the Senate floor, his newsletters and his press releases were all part of his legislative function: informing his colleagues and the public about wasteful spending.

The Supreme Court decided Hutchinson v. Proxmire in 1979. Chief Justice Burger wrote for the Court on June 26, 1979, which ruled against the Senator by a large majority, with Justice Brennan dissenting. The holding drew a line:

• Speech on the Senate floor and in committee is protected, even if it is defamatory.
• But press releases and newsletters sent to the public are not part of the legislative process itself, and are therefore not protected by the clause. The Court reasoned that informing the public is not an essential part of the deliberative process, even if it is a valuable function of an elected official.
• The Court also held that Hutchinson was not a public figure for purposes of the defamation standards, because he had not thrust himself into a public controversy, and that his receipt of federal research money did not by itself make him one.

The case was settled after it went back to the lower court. According to published accounts, Proxmire paid Hutchinson $10,000 and the Senate covered his legal bills, and the settlement did not include a retraction. Check the amount against a reliable account if it matters to you.

What the ruling means, and what it does not

I want to be even-handed about Hutchinson v. Proxmire, because the case cuts in two directions, and a conservative who cares about both free speech and the rule of law should see both.

The case is a good limit on legislative power. Members of Congress already have broad protection for what they say in the course of legislating. The Court declined to extend the same shield to every public statement a Member makes, because a shield that large would let a Senator defame a private citizen in a mailing with no remedy. That is a sensible refusal. It treats the privilege as a protection for the function of legislating, not as a personal license. In a republic, the people's representatives are not above the law of the people they represent.

The case is also a caution to critics of waste. Proxmire's mockery landed on a real person, a scientist whose work was legitimate even if you disagreed with the funding. The lesson is one the best critics already know: aim at the program, the decision, the agency and the official who approved the money, not the individual researcher or grantee. Ridicule belongs on ideas and public acts, not on private people who happened to receive a government check. A critic with an eye on the taxpayer should also keep an eye on fairness.

None of that diminishes the central achievement. The ruling left the floor speeches, the committee reports and the public hearings untouched, and those are the tools of oversight. The Golden Fleece Award survived as a practice because it could be adapted. The criticism could be made from the Senate floor, and in the next steps in the public record, with care about the names of private persons.

The conservative heir

The idea did not die with Proxmire's retirement in 1989. It found a new home. Tom Coburn, a Republican physician from Oklahoma who served in the Senate from 2005 to 2015, took up the same method, with the same eye for a specific item and a specific dollar figure. His office published reports, including an annual series called Wastebook, with editions such as Wastebook 2010 and later yearly volumes, that cataloged federal spending the senator regarded as wasteful, one item at a time, in plain language. Like Proxmire, Coburn worked from public records, and like Proxmire, he drew fire from those who said his examples were unfairly selected.

It is worth noting how similar the two men were in method and how different they were in party. Coburn was a conservative Republican who opposed earmarks and said so in public. Proxmire was a liberal-leaning Democrat who voted with his party on many things. They agreed on one point: the taxpayers' money should be spent as if the taxpayers were watching. See The Bridge to Nowhere Was Never Built, and Earmarks Came Back Anyway for a story that involved Coburn's fight against an earmark.

For a deeper look at the sources of such waste, see Washington Admits It Sends Billions to the Wrong People, by Law Every Year, and for the government's own scorecard of its trouble spots, GAO's High-Risk List Has Named Some of the Same Programs Since 1990.

The numbered case for ridicule as oversight

Here is the argument, and I mean it as a serious one, not a joke.

1. Waste is the predictable result of spending other people's money. Milton Friedman's four ways of spending money, covered in Friedman's Four Ways to Spend Money Explain Every Government Budget, explain why: when you spend someone else's money on someone else, you have little reason to economize or to care about the result. Government spending is mostly in that category.
2. Rules and audits catch some waste, and shame catches some that rules do not. An inspector general can write a report that nobody reads. A good one-line description, repeated, can change a budget.
3. Transparency is a conservative value. The people who pay should be able to see where the money goes. A program that cannot be explained in a sentence a voter would accept has a problem.
4. Oversight works best when it is bipartisan. If every complaint about waste is dismissed as partisan, nothing changes. A Democrat who did it for thirteen years is the best proof that it can be done without a party's name on it.
5. The method has rules. Specifics, plain language, public records, accuracy, and respect for private persons. A critic who is wrong once loses the audience for the rest.

Why a Democrat is the hero of this story

I confess I like that the best example comes from the other party. It deflates the idea that waste is a conservative cause and a liberal blind spot. It is neither. It is a human failing, and it afflicts every institution that does not pay its own bills. A conservative who wants to win the argument should want allies from across the aisle, and Proxmire is proof that the ally exists, if the argument is made in terms of stewardship and not ideology.

There is a point about the Founders here as well. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 requires that "a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." The words are there so that the people can see how their money is used, and a republic whose people cannot see where the money goes is a republic in name only. Proxmire's awards were an enforcement of that old clause, in the form of a press release.

The Founders also feared the opposite vice: a government that wastes in secret and punishes those who tell. The Speech or Debate Clause protects a legislator who speaks from the floor with full force. The limit imposed by the Court in 1979 was a limit on what happens outside the floor. The Founders gave Congress its tools; they did not give it a license to wound private individuals.

What a citizen can learn from it

You do not need a Senate seat to apply the Proxmire method. A few habits go a long way.

• Read the actual item. Federal spending data is public at USAspending.gov, and the budget documents are published on the agencies' sites and in the Treasury's reports.
• Describe it in one sentence. If you cannot, you may not yet understand it.
• Ask who approved it. The name of the official or committee is usually on the record.
• Check your facts before you speak. One wrong example can sink an entire argument.
• Write to your Member of Congress. A specific, documented question is the thing a congressional staffer takes seriously.

For the oversight channels available to any citizen, see How to Read an Inspector General Report and Use It to Hold an Agency to Account and the oversight page.

The case in brief

1. William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat who served in the Senate from 1957 to 1989, gave out the Golden Fleece Award monthly from 1975 to 1988 to call attention to wasteful federal spending.
2. The method worked because it was specific, plain, regular and funny, and because it made administrators imagine the headline before they signed.
3. Hutchinson v. Proxmire (1979) held that the Speech or Debate Clause does not protect press releases and newsletters, so critics of waste must take care with the facts and with private individuals.
4. Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican, carried the idea forward in his Wastebook reports, showing that the cause of stewardship crosses party lines.
5. A citizen can apply the same method with public records, plain language and accurate facts.

What you can do: Pick one federal grant or contract in your state from USAspending.gov, write one plain sentence describing what it paid for and the amount, and send it with a question to your Representative.