Released in October 1995, Taxpayers for Common Sense's “Budget of the Living Dead” marked the launch of TCS and its commitment to digging down into spending bills and telling taxpayers how their money is being spent.

We didn’t end up driving a stake through the heart of all these monsters, but we have saved taxpayers billions while working to make government work. 

“Taxpayers from all political persuasions agree on the common sense principle that, once a wasteful government program is killed, it should stay dead.  Unfortunately, like zombies in an old horror movie, 13 wasteful spending programs, subsidies and tax breaks that have been killed in recent years have risen from the dead. This taxpayers’ nightmare wastes billions of hard-earned dollars and further undermines Americans’ trust in their government and in both political parties. While average taxpayers are told they must share in mutual sacrifice, powerful special interests pull their programs out of the grave.

The zombie programs in this report might be laughable—except that the joke is on taxpayers who are footing the bill. If the 13 “killed” programs and tax breaks described in this report had never been revived, Taxpayers for Common $ense estimates that taxpayers could have saved over $46 billion since 1980. If the 13 programs and tax breaks in this report were ended today, we estimate that taxpayers could save over $58 billion more in the next five years…..”

Read the full report here.

To see some scary hair styles and fashion choices, check out the 1995 KTVU news coverage of the report's release: