In April 1977, Sen. William Proxmire gave The Smithsonian Institution a Golden Fleece Award for spending $89,000 — $435,124 in 2022 dollars — to create a dictionary of Tzotzil, an obscure and unwritten Mayan language spoken by a few hundred thousand people in southern Mexico.
Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave awards for wasteful and nonsensical spending, eventually handing out 168 Golden Fleece Awards between 1975 and 1988.
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