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:
So, it could only cost $9 million, with the option to spend up to $18 million. Raise your hand if you think the government will end up on the low end of that estimate. No one? All right. Moving on. Sunlight Labs, which bid on the job, notes that we have no idea yet what we’re supposed to be getting for this $18 million. Just like the stimulus! 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. Twitter is lousy today with discussion of the pricetag. 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. The company’s CEO Mike Pickett testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform yesterday about the site, which is frequently used by U.S. government agencies themselves to track stimulus spending in the absence of a useful iteration of Recovery.gov:
It may not be the most perfect tool for tracking spending that will ever be created-and Pickett himself admits it has some limitations-but it certainly accomplishes far more of what Obama envisioned than Recovery.gov, and it’s doing it contemporaneous with stimulus spending. The Obama administration could create the most complete site for tracking government spending ever known to mankind, but it won’t do much good if it comes into existence right after all the stimulus money is already spent. When I heard Pickett speak in May, he estimated his company had spent about $20,000 building their Recovery.org site. They were able to keep it cheap because they already have the infrastructure and expertise for such tracking, and he added it’d would take more money to maintain throughout all the spending. But let’s say it cost $1 million total. What’s costing the Obama administration so much? Does slathering everything in Gotham font really cost $17 mill these days?
