WASHINGTON (SBG) - For decades, former Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire made it his mission to track wasteful government spending, highlighting these agencies and organizations by granting them the “Golden Fleece” award.

“A Democrat from Wisconsin, Bill Proxmire, he gets to Washington D.C., and he sees that it's the Super Bowl of corruption, with the wasteful spending, with the nonsense, and so he decides to do something about it. And so he comes up with this Golden Fleece award and for 14 years between 1975 and 1988, he gives out 170 of these awards,” said Open The Book’s Adam Andrzejewski to Scott Thuman on The National Desk.

Senator Proxmire passed away in 2015, but Andrzejewski believes that if he were still alive the Senator would disapprove of plenty of projects that we've seen in recent years. For example, each day at Real Clear Policy, OpenTheBooks posts a "waste of the day" and all outrageous examples can be found by searching #wasteoftheday.

“I’d give a Golden Fleece award to Cornell University, they're an Ivy League college and they took taxpayer money, a million dollars, on a study where it hurts the most to be stung by a bee. It turns out it's the nostril,” said Andrzejewski. “It's a waste of a million dollars.”

“At the height of the pandemic, there were 44 million Americans who lost their jobs. Unemployment insurance was supposed to help these people who have real needs. And now we know that up to $400 billion has been stolen from that program,” said Andrzejewski. “It is the largest public fraud in the history of the country.”

Last month, President Joe Biden appointed Juneteenth a federal holiday, making it the 44th paid day off for federal employees.

“That's nearly nine weeks of paid time off,” said Andrzejewski. “Those 44 days of paid time off we estimate cost the American taxpayer every single year roughly $24 billion.”