In the 1980s, reports of a $435 hammer, a $640 toilet seat and a $7,600 coffee pot bought by the military were widely publicized. They were used to show that the federal purchasing system was broken.
Senator Chuck Grassley returned to the example in a 2018 op-ed. He gave the price of the hammer as $436 and wrote about the Pentagon’s $14,000 3-D printed toilet seat lids.