In 1975, the Bureau of Land Management required so much paperwork from companies bidding to sell fire equipment to the agency that it drove up the cost of the bid by almost four time just to cover the red tape.

While the equipment should have cost $8,000, it cost about $31,000, a $23,000 difference — almost $125,000 in 2022 dollars.

That’s why Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave the Bureau a Golden Fleece Award for wasteful and nonsensical spending in July of that year.

The agency had issued "155 pages of requirements, including 23 fold-out diagrams, for fire equipment to be placed on two pickup trucks."

The request for bids was sent to 41 companies but only two responded and the contract was awarded to the lowest bidder for $15,497 per unit, for a total of $30,994.

“Why such a poor response?” Proxmire asked then. “Because the paperwork accompanying the bid created so great a burden to the small companies in the fire equipment business that few could afford to bother.”

One firm, Fire-X Corporation, said the equipment could have been supplied for $4,000 per unit “without the complicated and massive government requirements detailing the placement of every screw and bolt.”

For that firm to bid, it would have had to charged three-to-five times higher than normal to pay for all the paper pushing, Promxire said.

“The effect of the overwhelming paperwork burden is to squeeze small business out of government work and to inflate the cost of procurement for government agencies,” the senator said.

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