In 1977, The Labor Department Spent $1.7 Million on a Door-To-Door Census “Is Your Dog Vaccinated?”

Have you ever wondered how many dogs, cats and horses are in your county?

The people of Ventura County, California were given $385,000 ($1.7 million in 2021 dollars) in 1977 by the U.S. Department of Labor to hire 101 people to do a door-to-door survey of the 160,000 houses and apartments and count the animals.

The funding was awarded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a law signed in 1973 to train workers and help them get jobs in public service.

While CETA funds are supposed to help provide jobs, they’re also used to meet a local, urgent need, which, according to the proposal for this project, meant finding out how many dogs hadn’t been vaccinated against rabies.

The animal regulation director of Ventura County had already assured the staff of U.S. Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, that there hadn’t been a documented case of rabies in dogs or cats in more than a decade.

That misuse of the CETA funding earned this project a Golden Fleece award from Proxmire.

While the U.S. Constitution requires a census count of the human population every 10 years, it makes no mention of animals.

The #WasteOfTheDay is presented by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.