The New Recovery.Gov - "Cheeseburgers or Steaks"?

Friday, July 10, 2009 4:14 PM

The contract to re-design Recovery.gov - the administration's website that was touted as letting taxpayers track every dollar of the "stimulus" package but has fallen far short of doing so - has been awarded.

Smartronix, a Maryland-based IT firm that specializes in defense contracts, won the contract at a whopping price tag to taxpayers of $9.5 million to create a “Version 2.0″ of the site, and then possiblly another $8.5 million to continue running the site through January 2014.

What is ironic, as Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has pointed out, is the fact that the contract for the transparency website has not been released, and GSA will only make it available upon FOIA request.

Also problematic, according to Brito, is:

The fact that the Request For Proposals to build the new Recovery.gov site was never placed on Recovery.gov. The announcement that the contract was even awarded was not put on Recovery.gov. It's a problem. It's a site that's supposed to be about transparency, but we're not being very transparent about how we're building the site.

As Clay Johnson, director of the Sunlight Foundation's Sunlight Labs, has commented:

We don’t know what government has bought, whether it’s cheeseburgers or steaks, (...) If recovery.gov is meant to track every single dime of the stimulus money, shouldn’t they start with themselves?

I would think so, and I am sure so would you. But the administration apparently doesn't. 

Tags: Transparency Federal | Comments (13)

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