Now that Christmas is over and the New Year beckons, it’s time for Watchdog.org’s annual parade of malfeasance and miscreants.

The Scariest People of 2015 is a frightening list indeed, filled with bureaucrats and functionaries who, shall we say, do not share an affinity for liberty.

No one can stop them from plying their trade — bad government is as old as government. But we can keep an eye on them, report their misdeeds to the world and once in a while help the good guys win.

Through New Year’s Day, we’ll highlight the most egregious examples of nanny statism, overweening bureaucracy and just plain old bad government from the past 12 months, encompassing local, state and federal officialdom.

Here’s No. 15.

After the BP Deepwater Horizons drilling rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, Louisiana’s attorney general turned to private law firms for help in prosecuting the case.

THE BUDDY SYSTEM: Louisiana Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell was defeated in November’s election by fellow Republican Jeff Landry. Landry campaigned against Caldwell’s history of giving lucrative contracts for state legal work to campaign donors, a practice Landry promised to end.

One of those firms, New Orleans-based Usry, Weeks & Matthews, ended up billing Louisiana taxpayers for more than $7 million in legal fees.  While they were cashing checks from the state treasury, those attorneys were donating $115,000 to help re-elect James “Buddy” Caldwell, the same attorney general who handed out the $600 per-hour, no-bid contract in the first place.

Caldwell was one of the good-ol’ boys of Louisiana politics He’d held political office for 37 years, including three consecutive terms as state attorney general, before voters showed him the door in November.

He was beaten by a fellow Republican, Jeff Landry, a tea party-backed insurgent candidate who put Caldwell’s history of outsourcing legal work to his donors at the center of the campaign and promised to do away with what he dubbed “the Buddy system.”

That system was a lucrative one for Caldwell’s friends and political supporters. Of the 11 firms that received state contracts to work on the BP oil spill, six were among Caldwell’s top campaign donors, according to Louisiana Lawsuit Abuse Watch, a nonprofit legal watchdog.

It wasn’t just the BP spill. Caldwell often outsourced legal work to private firms that donated to his campaign, an arrangement that profited both parties. The two law firms that donated the most to Caldwell since he took office got more than 30 contracts to do some of the state’s legal work, according to LLAW.

Caldwell was hardly alone in handing out lucrative legal contracts to campaign donors and political allies. Attorneys general in Pennsylvania, Mississippi and elsewhere have long done the same thing. It’s legal. But he mastered the art – a New York Times investigation found firms that donated to Caldwell’s campaign got $54 million worth of state contracts since 2011.

For Buddy’s buddies, the former attorney general was a conduit to big bucks. For taxpayers in Louisiana, he was emblematic of the scary relationship between trial lawyers and state governments.