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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, our award is going to the Nation­al Insti­tute of Health (NIH) for spend­ing rough­ly $1.4 mil­lion to devel­op an app that focus­es on con­nect­ing Lati­na women in real-time for social walks.

The Nation­al Insti­tute On Minor­i­ty Health And Health Dis­par­i­ties — a sub­sidiary of NIH — fun­neled the tax­pay­er dol­lars to Klein Buen­del, Inc., a small, woman-owned health com­mu­ni­ca­tion research and tech­nol­o­gy firm that, accord­ing to its web­site, “designs, devel­ops, and eval­u­ates pub­lic health inter­ven­tions in col­lab­o­ra­tion with aca­d­e­m­ic, pub­lic, and pri­vate partners.”