Eugene, Oregon once spent $80,000 in extra federal money to create an incomprehensible sculpture, just to justify next year's budget.
The federal government once built 33 courthouses with extra courtrooms equivalent to nine more courthouses - entirely by accident.
An artist took a federal grant and created "art" out of a decommissioned Newark city bus to leave it on a pole 28 feet in the...
The Federal Aviation Administration spent $5 million on a three-week-long Christmas party in 2009 and called it a conference.
The Army Corps of Engineers built a dam in Oklahoma for $50 million, only to have the upstream river dry out, so the lake never formed.
The Census Bureau spent $2.5 mllion in 2010 to advertise on the Super Bowl, and the ad laid one of the event's biggest bombs.
The National Science Foundation once spent $440,000 on research into online dating and how that affects its practitioners.
Conferences on AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) offered luxuries to their conferees that contributed nothing to a solution.
The federal government’s airport subsidies pay for commercial flight routes that carry few passengers because people drive the distance.
In 2010 the federal government spent a million dollars putting poems up for zoo visitors to read in five big-city zoos.