How in the hell does a website cost that kind of money? Are they using the Microsoft model of product development?
Well, Recovery.gov (or is it Recvoery.gov?) needs more than nifty diagrams of money that may or may not have already been spent, so the tech-savviest administration ever went looking for a vendor. It succeeded in getting one to redesign the site for a mere $18 million:
The new Web site promises to give taxpayers more information about where their money is going than the current version of the site.
“Recovery.gov 2.0 will use innovative and interactive technologies to help taxpayers see where their dollars are being spent,” James A. Williams, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, says in a press release announcing the contract awarded to Maryland-based Smartronix Inc. “Armed with easy access to this information, taxpayers can make government more accountable for its decisions.”
The contract calls for spending $9.5 million through January, and as much as $18 million through 2014, according to the GSA press release. […]Maybe someday we can pay $13 million for a site that will track the $18 million-dollar tracking site redesign, a year after the fact.
[…]The changes to the site are necessary to live up to the promises Obama made about transparency when passing the stimulus.
[…]Of course, because the necessary changes will be taking place after more than $100 billion has been spent, and during a summer when the administration has promised to increase the speed of spending (Although who knows by how much? Not the White House!), there’s no way to tell how much of that money has been lost to waste or fraud and how much has been spent wisely.Or, is there? At Recovery.org, a site run by a private company whose job it is to track government spending and contract processes, there’s real-time tracking of stimulus spending. They normally collect and sell such information to businesses looking for government contracts, but decided to chart the stimulus because they realized they could deliver what Obama had promised.
So the government isn’t buying Recovery.org because…?
#30 “Dubya was a great speaker”
ROTFL You’re killing me dude, stop it. I will say this about the man, he was a great Ivy League party animal in his day.
Party on, Garth.
all star.
HOW long does it take to change what WAS done?
Think about some person borrowing your car, and crashing it.
How long would it take the insurance company to FIX it. And would it drive properly AFTER you got it back?
YOU try to convince 300 people to give up ALL they got under Bush Jr.
#32-ECA=HOW long does it take to change what WAS done?
How long does it take Obama to spend more money than all of his predecessors combined and the car is still not fixed?
Bush is gone – Obama is the one screwing us.
#26, #31 – qb
He’s quoting me.
#29 – qb – Doesn’t anyone care that *cough* IBM *cough* has their mitts all over this?
Yes, it smells consultants… 😀
#32 – ECA
Good post.
#33 – allstar – How long does it take Obama to spend more money than all of his predecessors combined and the car is still not fixed?
Stop watching Fox News… it’s not good for you. 😛
#35-Jägermeister
Ahh you failed math… unfortunate.
$18 million is chump change. You people obviously haven’t heard of the Defense Travel System. Over $500 million have been pumped into what is essentially a crappy Expedia clone with a claim disbursement component.
#23 – Obama is still claiming he inherited this economy. That would mean Bush inherited 9/11. Similar time periods. Unless you’re admitting this is Obama’s economy.
#38 – Toxic Asshead
Bush Jr. inherited the terrorist threat. Did he do anything to ramp up security?
Hmmm, Why do I have the feeling that the information at Recovery.org is going to make the government look much worse than the information at Recovery.gov?
33.
aLL STAR?
So obama has spent more then $18 trillion dollars in 6 months??
The bills posted by obama had ADDONS PORT from WHO?? that doubled the bills??
YOU TRY, to talk 2/3 of congress and reps into DOING ANYTHING..
YOU TRY to get corps out of washington.
The ONLY way he is going to get anything done, is to bring it up to the PEOPLE of this nation and LET THEM WATCH, as there senators and reps, MESS IT ALL UP. SHOW the public what is going on..GET US PISSED OFF at our REPRESENTIVES, that we VOTED for.
your outrage is largely misguided and based in the stone age. check some facts first.
$18M for a big secure corporate site – and the US government is larger more complex than most businesses – is nothing.
$100M & hundreds of staff are not unheard of for the design, construction, operation & maintenance of massive sites.
They could have found a random web developer to do this free of charge.
#42 curmudgeon
I posted something here with links but it got flagged as spam. If you compare the RFP for the site with sales literature from IBM you’ll notice that whoever put this bid together either copied and pasted IBM’s “solution architecture” or they just had IBM do it.
You’re right about the money, but it’s pathetic how poorly the bid process was run.
I couldn’t get Congress to do anything.
Obama and the Dem leaders seem to be very good at getting the House and sometimes the Senate to pass huge spending bills sight unseen. They just claim its and emergency and they don’t have time for due diligence and the twits go along with it.
I think they have only manged to spend about 10% of the “stimulus” package so for and while _some+ of the projects seem like something worth doing as jobs packages go they are a sick joke.
Let’s be honest this was a giant pork package where they threw everything every Congress critter had ever requested together but hadn’t as yet been passed without any regard for the cost or the actual need if any for the project and passed it in order to show the American people their Congress critters cared and were looking out for them.
This was not a jobs program. In order to create a jobs program somebody with a brain actually has to set down and do some thinking about what actually needs to be done to increase employment and put together something that would have a chance of creating jobs.
That was not how the stimulus package was done.
#42 They could have most likely gotten the same thing or better for a couple of hundred thousand but if you want to pay more you can always find somebody willing to charge more.
I’m sure they did what amounted to having the software equivalent of a hammer or pulley custom made a few hundred times in this project rather than using a stranded issue hammer.
The down side of that kind of thinking is that the custom code is more likely to have undiscovered bugs and design flaws in it.
Of course the provider may not in fact have written all new code and just charged like they did.
There is an old saying, “A fool and his money are soon parted.”
#45, deowll,
I think they have only manged to spend about 10% of the “stimulus” package so …
Then you wrote,
…somebody with a brain actually has to set down and do some thinking about what actually needs to be done …
So they aren’t going fast enough but if they went any faster they wouldn’t be thinking.
Another post worthy of the Right Wing Nut of the Day Award.
Recovery.gov
Maybe it should be a website to help lawmakers to recover from porkitis…
Transparency my arse..
That website is a huge waste of tax money.
it is a pure propaganda machine and
nothing more.
If anything, It should be called the
“Great Depression v2.0”
MAYBE if they ever decided to tell the
truth (about anything) and stopped fabricating/spinning the numbers it might
be a worthy idea.
If you want a glimpse at some real data
concerning this fictitious “recovery”,
head on over http://shadowstats.com/
for healthy dose of reality.
-after that, head over to The Market Oracle: http://marketoracle.co.uk/ and get a clue (with hard data to back it up) from people who actually work in the marketplace, about what is really going on with our economy as well as those around the globe.
Recovery.gov is only for the gullible, brainwashed masses that that love to be
spoon fed candy coated crap on a daily bases.
-whoever is in charge of hiring/allocating website funding should be tared, feathered and fired.
-s
Hmmm. From the same folks who are going to fix the health care system…
Good luck, suckers.
Hey. I just put up MY site for $7.36 a month, using Squarespace and the Tech5 discount (TECH). Thanks, John! It’s great. Perhaps you should send an email to the the HOPECHANGE guy.
I don’t see how funding such a website is a problem, considering that it disseminates government information to millions of citizens.
The US Military goes through $18 million dollars an hour.
#46 – a decade ago, fortune 500 companies were already spending 9-figures for their web presences, often combined with intranet and extranet components. these days, highly-interactive self-service features are also common. yes many components are better easier and cheaper now, but interactivity is expensive to build or maintain & costly security and privacy reqs only get more and more severe. big business tools cost major moolah. always have, always will.
#44 – I believe you, but RFPs aren’t always tight, often rushed. the key to success is how well the contract is structured and managed. Let’s hope they have some geniuses doing that.