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Boondoggle, in the sense of a term for a project that wastes time and money, first appeared during the Great Depression in the 1930s, referring to the millions of jobs given to unemployed men and women to try to get the economy moving again, as part of the New Deal. It came into common usage after a 1935 New York Times headline claimed that over $3 million had been spent teaching the jobless how to make boon doggles¹.

In more recent times the term "Boondoggle" has come to refer to a government or corporate project involving large numbers of people and usually, heavy expenditure, where at some point the key operators have realized that the project is never going to work, but are reluctant to bring this to the attention of their superiors. Generally there is an aspect of "going through the motions", (for example, continuing research and development), for as long as funds are available to keep paying the researchers' and executives' salaries and so on. The situation can be allowed to continue for what seem like unreasonably long periods, as senior management are often reluctant to admit that they allowed a failed project to go on for so long. In many cases, the actual device itself may eventually work, but not well enough to ever recoup its development costs. The classic example of this situation is the many federally funded sites in the Nuclear Weapons Complex that many say have outlived their usefulness since the end of the cold war.

An important aspect of the Boondoggle, as opposed to a project that simply fails, is the eventual realization by its operators that it is never going to work, long before it is finally shut down. This is not the same thing as simply fraud, where the proponents know in advance that their idea has no merit.

One example of this was the RCA "SelectaVision" (CED) video disk system project, commenced in the early 1960s and allowed to drag on for nearly 20 years, long after cheaper and better alternatives had come to market. RCA were estimated to have spent about $750 million (1985 dollars) on this commercially useless system, which was one of the factors leading to its bankruptcy in 1988.

Another is the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic passenger aircraft. As with the SelectaVision system, although actual planes were built and regular services maintained for decades, the income from this has barely made a dent in the actual cost of the project. In this case, by the early 1970s it had already become painfully obvious that the advantages of supersonic flight were going to be nowhere near enough to compete with the low fares made possible by slower but much more cost-effective aircraft.

Boondoggle is also known in the business world for trips taken to "exotic" or popular locations for a meeting. Usually, these meetings could have been either handled over the phone or not occurred at all.^{[citation needed]}

• Note 1: "$3,187,000 relief is spent to teach jobless to play; $19,658,512 voted for April; 'Boon Doggles' Made", New York Times, April 4, 1935. 

• White elephant

• Michael Quinion. BOONDOGGLE. World Wide Words. Retrieved on February 19, 2005.