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The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just The News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s.
This week’s Golden Horseshoe is awarded to the Centers for Disease Control for spending $420,000 to buy location data for millions of Americans’ phones. While the data was purportedly acquired for COVID-19 tracking, the agency is reportedly using it to support varied, agency-wide surveillance efforts far beyond pandemic monitoring, according to federal spending watchdog site OpenTheBooks.com.
While the CDC claimed it purchased the data to monitor Americans’ adherence to lockdown curfews and visits to pharmacies for vaccine monitoring, the CDC envisages tracking people as they engage in physical activity and visit gyms, parks, weight management businesses â and even places of worship, according to public records obtained by Vice through a Freedom of Information Act request…
