Hammer time

Two decades later, perhaps the most enduring example of government waste is the $436 Pentagon hammer. The ignominious piece of hardware, though hardly the most egregious purchase of the time, struck a chord with the American public and became an emblem of the Department of Defense's procurement scandals of the 1980s.

Critics fear that such wasteful spending will continue and worsen under the Homeland Security Act because, they say, the federal government is applying even less scrutiny to antiterrorism budgets than it did to defense programs at the height of its contract controversies. At that time, the price of a $7 claw hammer--officially termed a "uni-directional impact generator"--ballooned by $429 (not accounting for inflation), thanks to the government's byzantine accounting processes.