UPDATED – Worst of the Waste: The 100 Outrageous Government Spending Projects of 2010

Tina Korbe / December 20, 2010

Update – 10:30 a.m. Dec. 21 – MSNBC host Rachel Maddow yesterday defended Deadhead-related spending. “Sen. Coburn has picked a classic culture war target,” she wrote on her blog. “The Grateful Dead and their buckets of hallucinogens, etc., can be counted on to divide opinion, should anyone actually notice Mr. Coburn’s Wastebook.”

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The Grateful Dead have been named among the top “100 Greatest Artists of All Time” by Rolling Stone magazine. Now, they rank among the 100 worst examples of wasteful government spending in 2010.

A report prepared by Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) office reveals taxpayers shelled out $615,000 so the University of California at Santa Cruz could digitize Grateful Dead photographs, tickets, backstage passes, fliers, shirts and other memorabilia.

“This is one of the first efforts to preserve and share cultural and historical artifacts of the baby boom generation, a group that includes 76 million Americans,” representatives of the Institute of Museum and Library Services explained.

So let the Baby Boomers pay for it out of their own pockets.

When taxpayers aren’t shelling out money for music memorabilia, they’re busy paying for the other projects listed in Coburn’s report. Here are a few named in the report:
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