Throwback Thursday: DOE Sends Bureaucrats to Life Planning Course
The Department of Education spent $40,375 in 1978 — $183,403 in 2022 dollars — on a career and life-planning course for its employees, earning it a Golden Fleece Award.
Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave awards to wasteful and nonsensical spending, eventually handing out 168 Golden Fleece Awards between 1975 and 1988.
He gave the award to what he referred to as The Office of Education, which was a precursor to the U.S. DOE.
The money was spent “in an attempt to give 35 of its ambitious or unhappy bureaucrats a new lease on their career lives” he said in a press release at the time.
The cost covered the almost three dozen staff members attending a “creative career and life planning” course during work hours and cost $1,153 per person.
“While I believe overburdened citizens should not have to shell out tax dollars for such purposes at all, ironically the same course with the same instructors could have been taken on employees’ own time for $475, or a total cost of $23,750 less,” Proxmire said.
The 3 ½ hour sessions over 10 days taught them “to take a holistic rather than an atomistic approach to life,” to write a 50-200 page autobiography, to analyze their hobbies, to decide how they would give away $10 million, among other things.
Proxmire said the course asked participants to “conduct an on-site personal survey of a community in the general area of where they live during which they talk to people according to a well thought out plan which leaves room for ‘improvisation, serendipity and the chance encounter.’”
Considering the Golden Fleece awards are given out for the “biggest, most ironic and ridiculous examples of wasteful spending by the federal government,” as determined by the senator, it’s no surprise the Department of Education won for the month of September 1978.
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