Waste of the Day: Throwback Thursday: Commerce Dept. Holds Multiple Training Sessions At Three-Star Hotels

In 1982, The Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency spent $138,000 – $440,000 in 2023 dollars – to hold three management training seminars at three-star resort hotels.

For this wasteful spending, Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave the Commerce Department a Golden Fleece Award. He gave awards to wasteful and nonsensical spending, eventually handing out 168 Golden Fleece Awards between 1975 and 1988.

According to the agency memo, the seminars would “ensure that ALL – repeat, ALL – agency personnel (from clerk typists to the senior executives) are ‘playing from the same score’ in the MBDA symphony! Put another way, we’ll all be marching to the same drummer for the first time in the agency’s history.”

The idea for the training sessions came after the inspector general of the Commerce Department issued a highly critical report about the operation of the agency responsible for assisting the development of minority-owned businesses.

After that report, the agency hired an outside consultant to plan and run the training sessions to help improve the agency’s function, Proxmire explained.

In a memo, citing management plans for MBDA staff, the deputy director wrote, “As you are all now aware, MBDA is moving in a new direction, symbolized by the Northbound Train!”

That June, 40 people attended a training seminar in Virginia. A month later, a memo from the agency’s deputy director explained he wanted top Washington staff to attend three sessions, one in Virginia and two in San Diego, while all other employees of the Washington office and all the regional offices would attend one or more of the sessions.

After getting word of the plan, Proxmire’s office contacted the agency, questioning the costs of all support staff attending the conferences. The inspector general, who earlier issued the critical report, wrote to the MBDA director, “I want to repeat and emphasize my concerns about your bringing in support staff to these seminars.”

The deputy director later dropped support staff attendance, and relocated the San Diego conferences to closer-by Baltimore. But the seminar sites were still held at three-start resort hotels

In the end, 177 people attended three seminars costing $138,000.

“I have no quarrel with an agency trying to improve its effectiveness,” Proxmire said. “But how many of these management training seminars must the taxpayers support before the MBDA symphony finally plays in harmony and the Northbound Train reaches its final destination?”

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This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.