The Swine Line

The General Services Administration just announced a plan to spend $18 million to revamp Recovery.org.  Smartronix Inc., a Maryland-based firm,  who was awarded the contract, will receive the money in two increments, $9.5 million through January 2010 and then the  remaining $7.5 million throughout 2014.  The effort to shed much needed sunshine on the stimulus and recovery efforts is to be applauded, but this project seems like it will be costing too much and delivering too late. 

In comparison,  America’s first transparency and accountability website, USAspending.gov, was created in 2006 and is maintained for less than $1 million.  USAspemding.gov is a comprehensive and searchable database which lists every federal contract and expenditure by fiscal year.  It seems implausible that Recovery.gov needs $18 million for a re-design when USAspending.gov got up and running from the start for a small fraction of that.

The inflated price tag might have something to do with the fact that Smartronix is still new to Web design.  When considering awarding the contract, The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board was looking for “an innovative, award winning, Web design and implementation firm with expertise on user-focused, data-driven Web designs.”  Strangely enough, Smartronix specializes in areas including “cybersecurity, custom enterprise software, systems design, and health IT.”  According to Informationweek, Smartronix hardly has any web design experience.  This is not to say they are inexperienced altogether; Smartronix has won more than  $260 million in federal contractsover the last decade, which is ironically, listed on the less expensive USAspending.gov.

Although Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, is “pleased that another major milestone has been achieved,” one has to wonder what this milestone is.  Spending 18 times more to report on the stimulus than is needed for the rest of the federal government combined may break a record or two, but is certainly not a milestone to be celebrated.