Golden Fleece Award
Based on Wikipedia: Golden Fleece Award
The Senator Who Made Government Waste Famous
Every month for thirteen years, government officials across the United States dreaded a particular press release from Wisconsin. Senator William Proxmire had found another way your tax dollars were being wasted, and he was about to tell everyone about it.
The Golden Fleece Award became one of the most effective pieces of political theater in American history. Between 1975 and 1988, Proxmire handed out 168 of these sardonic honors to agencies and projects he deemed ridiculous wastes of public money. The Washington Post called it "the most successful public relations device in politics today." Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia went further, declaring that the Golden Fleece had become "as much a part of the Senate as quorum calls and filibusters."
The name itself was a clever bit of wordplay. The original Order of the Golden Fleece was a prestigious chivalric honor created in the late 1400s by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Knights who received it joined an exclusive brotherhood of European nobility. But Proxmire wasn't thinking about medieval honor codes. He was thinking about the verb "to fleece"—meaning to cheat someone out of money. His Golden Fleece Award celebrated not nobility, but the opposite: bureaucratic foolishness that picked the pockets of American taxpayers.
The First Victim: Why Do People Fall in Love?
The inaugural Golden Fleece went to the National Science Foundation in 1975. Their offense? Spending eighty-four thousand dollars on a study investigating love.
Proxmire's objection was memorable:
I object to this not only because no one—not even the National Science Foundation—can argue that falling in love is a science; not only because I'm sure that even if they spend eighty-four million or eighty-four billion they wouldn't get an answer that anyone would believe. I'm also against it because I don't want the answer. 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.
It was the perfect debut. The award combined righteous fiscal indignation with folksy wisdom about romance. Newspapers loved it. The public ate it up. And Proxmire had found his formula.
A Catalog of Alleged Absurdity
Over the next thirteen years, the senator assembled a remarkable collection of what he considered governmental foolishness. Some awards targeted elaborate boondoggles. Others focused on research that sounded silly when reduced to a headline.
The Federal Aviation Administration earned their fleece for spending fifty-seven thousand eight hundred dollars measuring airline stewardesses. The study catalogued the precise dimensions of 432 women, including, as Proxmire gleefully noted, "distance from knee to knee while sitting" and something called the "popliteal length of the buttocks." The agency presumably had reasons related to cockpit and cabin design, but those explanations never made for good copy.
The Department of Defense took multiple hits. Three thousand dollars went to determine whether military personnel should carry umbrellas in the rain. Six thousand dollars funded a study on how to buy Worcestershire sauce. The irony of an institution that spent billions on weapons systems being pilloried for six thousand dollars was not lost on observers, but Proxmire understood that small numbers with funny details played better than abstract billions.
Some awards had a certain poetry to them. The Department of Justice funded a study on why prisoners want to escape. The answer would seem self-evident, yet apparently required formal investigation. The Postal Service spent over four million dollars on advertisements encouraging Americans to write more letters to one another—this during the era before email and texting would make that mission truly quixotic.
The Research That Fought Back
Not everyone accepted their Golden Fleece gracefully. In 1976, a behavioral scientist named Ronald Hutchinson decided to sue.
Hutchinson had received federal funding to study aggression patterns. When Proxmire awarded him a Golden Fleece, Hutchinson argued that the senator's press releases had damaged his reputation and his ability to secure future research grants. He sued for eight million dollars in damages.
Proxmire thought he was protected. The Speech or Debate Clause of the United States Constitution shields members of Congress from legal liability for things they say on the floor of the House or Senate. This protection exists so legislators can speak freely without fear of lawsuits—a principle dating back to conflicts between the English Parliament and the Crown.
But the Supreme Court of the United States saw things differently. In a 1979 decision called Hutchinson versus Proxmire, the justices ruled eight to one that constitutional protection covered only formal congressional proceedings. Press releases, newsletters, and television appearances were fair game for defamation claims.
This was a significant moment in American law. Legislators could still say whatever they wanted in committee hearings or floor debates. But the moment they stepped outside those official venues—the moment they sought publicity through other channels—they became as vulnerable to lawsuits as any other citizen.
Proxmire eventually settled with Hutchinson out of court. But the case didn't deter him. He continued handing out Golden Fleeces for another nine years.
The Case Against Ridicule
Decades later, a different kind of criticism emerged. Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar Animation Studios and a man who understood creative research intimately, devoted part of his 2014 book Creativity, Inc. to what he called the "chilling effect" of the Golden Fleece Award.
Catmull's argument was subtle but important. When a government funds thousands of research projects, some will produce breakthrough results and others will seem to go nowhere. That's not a bug in the system—it's how research works. Nobody can predict which experiments will transform our understanding of the world and which will yield inconclusive data. If that prediction were possible, we wouldn't call it research.
The problem with public ridicule, Catmull argued, is that it makes researchers afraid to fail. And fear of failure distorts how scientists choose projects. They start avoiding anything that might sound silly when summarized in a press release. They gravitate toward safe, incremental work rather than bold questions with uncertain answers. The long-term cost is slower scientific progress.
This criticism connects to a deeper tension in democratic governance. Citizens have a right to know how their taxes are spent. Public scrutiny of government spending serves as a check against genuine waste and corruption. But scientific research is inherently unpredictable, and projects that sound absurd in a newspaper headline sometimes yield vital knowledge.
The Screwworm Myth
One story about the Golden Fleece has circulated for years, cited as proof that Proxmire sometimes got it wrong. According to this tale, the senator mocked federal funding for research into the sex life of the screwworm fly—and that very research led to one of the greatest pest control successes in agricultural history.
The screwworm is not actually a worm. It's the larval stage of a fly that lays eggs in open wounds on livestock. These larvae literally eat their hosts from the inside, causing tremendous suffering and economic losses to cattle ranchers throughout the Americas. For decades, screwworms killed millions of dollars worth of livestock annually.
Scientists at the United States Department of Agriculture developed an elegant solution. They discovered that female screwworm flies mate only once in their lives. By raising millions of screwworms in laboratories, sterilizing the males with radiation, and releasing them into the wild, researchers could effectively sabotage screwworm reproduction. Wild females would mate with sterile males, produce no offspring, and the population would collapse. This technique, called the sterile insect method, eventually eliminated screwworms from North and Central America entirely.
The story goes that Proxmire mocked this research, only to eat his words when the results became clear.
There's just one problem: it probably never happened.
Researchers who have examined the archives of the Golden Fleece Award, held at the Wisconsin Historical Society, have found no evidence that Proxmire ever targeted the screwworm research. The timing doesn't work either. The crucial research on screwworm reproduction took place in the 1930s through 1950s, decades before Proxmire launched his awards in the mid-1970s. By the time the Golden Fleece existed, the screwworm program was already an established success story.
The myth appears to have started with a speech by a former director of the National Science Foundation, who claimed that Proxmire awarded a fleece to a grant titled "The Sexual Behavior of the Screwworm Fly" and later admitted the research had been valuable. But no documentary evidence supports this claim. The story has become too good to fact-check—a perfect parable about the dangers of mocking science that, ironically, may itself be based on no solid evidence.
The NASA Exception
One Golden Fleece that Proxmire genuinely did issue, and genuinely did reconsider, targeted the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA, had been funding efforts to detect radio signals from alien civilizations. The program, called SETI, short for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, used radio telescopes to scan the cosmos for patterns that might indicate technological activity elsewhere in the universe. To Proxmire, this seemed like the ultimate wild goose chase—spending taxpayer money to listen for little green men.
He gave NASA the Golden Fleece.
But Proxmire did something unusual afterward: he changed his mind. After learning more about the scientific rationale behind SETI, and perhaps after conversations with researchers who explained why the search wasn't as fanciful as it sounded, he withdrew his opposition. This reversal didn't get nearly as much publicity as the original award, but it suggests Proxmire was willing to be convinced when scientists made their case effectively.
The Uncomfortable Comedy of Legitimate Research
Looking back at the list of Golden Fleece recipients, a pattern emerges. Many targets were research projects that sounded ridiculous when stripped of context but addressed genuine scientific questions.
The National Science Foundation spent one hundred and three thousand dollars comparing aggressiveness in sunfish exposed to tequila versus gin. Absurd? Perhaps. But understanding how different substances affect animal behavior has applications in toxicology, neuroscience, and pharmacology. The fish don't know they're part of an experiment that will make a senator laugh.
Psychologist Harris Rubin received funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study marijuana's effects on sexual arousal. His methodology—exposing research subjects to pornographic films while measuring physiological responses—earned a Golden Fleece. But understanding how cannabis affects the brain and body was, and remains, a legitimate medical research question with implications for drug policy.
Paul Ekman's research on facial expressions of emotion earned Proxmire's scorn. Yet Ekman's Facial Action Coding System went on to influence fields ranging from psychology to artificial intelligence to airport security. Whether that influence has been entirely positive is debatable—the system has been used in controversial lie detection applications—but the research wasn't trivial.
The National Institute for Mental Health spent ninety-seven thousand dollars studying a Peruvian brothel. Researchers reported making "repeated visits in the interests of accuracy," which certainly sounds like a perk masquerading as science. But sex work has been studied by social scientists for decades because it illuminates questions about economics, power, public health, and human behavior that can't easily be studied in laboratories.
None of this means Proxmire was always wrong. Some targets probably did represent genuine waste. And even legitimate research can be conducted inefficiently or funded at excessive levels. But the Golden Fleece rarely engaged with those nuances. The format demanded mockery, not analysis.
The Legacy Problem
When Proxmire retired from the Senate in 1988, several members of the House of Representatives asked permission to continue the Golden Fleece tradition. He declined. Proxmire said he might continue issuing the awards as a private citizen, though it's unclear whether he ever did.
Other organizations picked up where he left off. Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group that monitors federal spending, gave Proxmire a lifetime achievement award in 1999 and revived the Golden Fleece in 2000. Proxmire served as an honorary chairman of the organization until his death in 2005.
But something had shifted in how America thought about science funding. In 2012, a coalition of scientific organizations created the Golden Goose Award—a deliberate counterpoint to Proxmire's creation. The Golden Goose celebrates federally funded research that initially seemed obscure or frivolous but went on to produce significant benefits for society.
The name plays on the fable of the goose that laid golden eggs. Where Proxmire saw waste to be mocked, the Golden Goose sees investment that sometimes pays off spectacularly. The award highlights how basic research, the kind that explores fundamental questions without immediate practical applications, often generates unexpected breakthroughs decades later.
Who Guards the Guardians of the Public Purse?
The Golden Fleece Award raises questions that remain unresolved in democratic societies. How should citizens evaluate government spending on research they don't understand? Who decides which scientific questions deserve funding? And what happens when the watchdogs get it wrong?
Proxmire genuinely believed he was performing a public service. Government agencies face constant pressure to expand their budgets and fund their allies. Without someone willing to point and laugh, bureaucratic bloat would go unchecked. The media amplification of his monthly awards created accountability that formal oversight processes often failed to provide.
But the critics have a point too. Science funding requires long time horizons and tolerance for failure. The projects that produce Nobel Prizes often look indistinguishable, in their early stages, from the projects that go nowhere. A system that punishes researchers for studying questions that sound silly is a system that will miss important discoveries.
The tension has never been resolved. Every few years, American politicians rediscover the appeal of mocking obscure-sounding research grants. And every few years, scientists push back by celebrating unexpected discoveries that emerged from curiosity-driven work.
Perhaps the real lesson of the Golden Fleece is that democratic accountability and scientific progress operate on different rhythms. Politics rewards quick judgments and clear villains. Science rewards patience and acceptance of uncertainty. Neither can fully accommodate the other, and the conflict between them may be a permanent feature of societies that try to fund research through public institutions.
The Most Expensive Weather
Among the Golden Fleece recipients, one stands out for reasons having nothing to do with scientific research. In 1985, Proxmire awarded his dubious honor to Ronald Reagan's inaugural committee.
Presidential inaugurations are elaborate affairs. The peaceful transfer of power—or in Reagan's case, the celebration of a second term—has always been marked with parades, balls, and public ceremonies. The 1985 inauguration was planned to be particularly grand, with fifteen and a half million dollars of taxpayer money allocated for the festivities.
Then January 21, 1985 arrived. The noon temperature was seven degrees Fahrenheit, which translates to negative fourteen degrees Celsius. Wind chills reached negative twenty-five Fahrenheit, or negative thirty-two Celsius. This made it the coldest inauguration in American history.
At those temperatures, exposed skin can develop frostbite in thirty minutes or less. The parade was cancelled. The outdoor swearing-in ceremony was moved indoors to the Capitol Rotunda. Most of the planned public events simply couldn't happen.
Proxmire pointed out that taxpayers had spent millions on an outdoor celebration that couldn't be held outdoors. It wasn't anyone's fault—nobody can control the weather—but the irony was too perfect to ignore. The government had been fleece not by corrupt officials or misguided scientists, but by a polar vortex.
Sometimes the universe itself delivers the punchline.