Government officials are spending taxpayer dollars to hunt down and confiscate artwork that was funded by New Deal programs.
Late last month, special agents from the General Service Administration’s office of inspector general located an etching that a private citizen had put up for sale on eBay and asked that the piece of art be removed from the website while they verified its authenticity.
The etching was funded by the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era program that paid artists to produce pieces for the government.
Although the unidentified owner of the etching had purchased it legally at an estate sale, GSA agents took the painting into custody and announced Friday their intention to find a place for the artwork in a government facility.
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The recovery was the latest in an ongoing effort to track down taxpayer-funded art that has been lost or stolen.
The program, dubbed the “WPA Art Recovery Project,” involves the GSA and its inspector general, as well as the FBI. It has been in operation for 14 years, but has only located 282 pieces of art.
According to a video the government produced to promote the effort, investigators from multiple agencies are chasing down thousands of missing paintings and plan to continue the taxpayer-funded program “until all the art is located.”
Critics have reportedly called the program wasteful because it expends government resources searching for paintings that have little monetary value and that have been in the hands of private citizens for decades.
But supporters of the project have argued the paintings are still government property and that they represent an important part of history.
A spokesman for the GSA did not return a request for comment about how much the art recovery project costs taxpayers.
Sarah Breen, spokeswoman for the GSA’s inspector general, said the project posed “minimal” costs to the watchdog office because no staff members work on the effort full time.
Other instances of the government’s art “recovery” include taking a painting from an individual in September who had purchased it at a yard sale and taking five murals from a historical nonprofit that had planned to donate the artwork.
