Federal Stimulus Website Redesign Could Cost Up To $18 Million

ABC News:

The idea was transparency. If the Obama administration was spending $797 billion as stimulus money to jump-start the economy, end the recession and bring down the unemployment rate, U.S. taxpayers had a right to know where the money was going.

Read the whole story: ABC News

Comments

[loki]

its going to be done by an American based company, which outsources its programming to a group in India. Thus , the 18 mil will help to keep the rich rich, and the US unemployed.

[dillydawg]

Whatever it takes to get the job done. If the result is a clearer and more precise information source, the cost will be well worth it. ABC news should just get off it and start reporting what is working resulting from the stimulus, instead of constantly finding ways small and even smaller to critize it. Afterall, it's our taxpayer $$$ that's funding this, so why would any reasonable person try to distort or derail its progress? If it fails we fail. It's not about Pres. Obama. It's about us.

[WIpatriot]

From the article: "Others working on the site, asking not to be quoted, said that while $18 million may be a lot to run a Web site, it's tiny compared to the size of the total stimulus package. "

It's also tiny compared to the total amount of money in the whole wide world.

And: ""OMB Watch built a site called FedSpending.org, which does basically the same thing," he said. "We said we'll license it for $600,000.""

The old adage "Ready. Fire. Aim." comes to mind.

[LemonMeringue]

Oops. Read the full article (I didn't before I posted earlier). The headline is misleading to the point of being a falsehood.

[moongal6]

You know people forget that we taxpayers paid Kenneth Starr 40 MILLION DOLLARS to investigate Pres. Bill Clinton back in 1994.
Of course, all Mr. Starr found in his investigation was a b*j*.
I want my money back.
I will gladly pay 18 million for a website that has oversight and real information.

[LemonMeringue]

I am a Web developer. This is outright graft. No Website costs $18 million. Some contractor is stealing from the taxpayers.

[dillydawg]

In your dreams. Delusional

[PINO]

Big time screw up. 'Palemoon' you stole my thunder. I was thinking the same thing. However, I could have offload the cost to a 3rd party to host the servers for $10K a year, charged back the government, while adding in administrative costs. pocketed $2Million and still would have saved the country $16 Mil.

this administration is bankrupting this country...pity.

[Palemoon]

LOLOL!! And to think people were outraged at Palin's lawyer charging her $30,000 an hour. Now we have President Obama getting fleeced by the same corporate lawyers. Who woulda thunk it?

Shoot, get a blade server, average IT guy and a webmaster, you could have that website up and running in less than a month for $500 on equipment, say $3,000 for hourly wages if they spent first 2 weeks playing golf.

[mat3]

18 million for the stimulus website, wonder what it would cost to oversee healthcare?

[fairplaystacy]

What a shame! They should shop around for the best price!
http://goodcheapfast.com

[stevepasek]

I've done similar portals for local government. The bids are usually way more than it costs, but there are usually several levels of contractors to be paid, after MBE/WBE and other considerations are included.

This could be done using modified open-source code for a fraction of the costs being cited here, maybe a couple million at most. The most expensive thing other than database design is the Flash charts that are being displayed, and, again, if the data is modeled properly, you're just feeding data into Flash and it does its thing.

It's these kinds of costs that show why "privatizing" functions of government is the biggest waste of taxpayer dollars, and I say that as a frequent government contractor. I have seen how bureaucratic and inefficient it is to work with multiple contractors as opposed to just hiring people full-time and creating your own team.

Hiring in-house takes more time, but it also lowers costs significantly.

And don't push the bullshit that "hardware and data storage is expensive". If you farm out the data storage, you can store it using Amazon S3 for like 3 cents a gigabyte, and it's perfectly scalable. Web servers are all that's needed locally, and all they have to host is some MySQL databases (which is now secure enough to meet government standards after the most recent release).

This is just bullshit.

[GretaR]

This site is built with modified open source...Drupal.

[Rover]

I own a website design firm, I'll do the site for 9 million... :)

[GretaR]

Me too. I'll do it for $1 million!

[PhilipTaylor]

UNBELIEVABLE!

JUST UNBELIEVABLE!

Are they KIDDING?

Buy Packaged Software and customize it!

[nellpost]

And who then could hack it?

[LemonMeringue]

One does not have to buy software anymore. The best software is open source.

And it is highly customizable. They could do this in Drupal, Expression Engine, or a dozen other content management systems - all free and customizable.

[MyrtleJune]

I'm available!!!! Lucky you :-) Call me!

[raechel]

It will be $40 million before it's done. And the problem isn't the website, it's gathering all of the information and putting it together in a sensible way for presentation. The website is a nit. The project will fail because there are too many different organizations involved, and they'll never be able to get things into common formations. Then again, all they need to do really is get some of the info together, dress it up a bit, and throw it up there. How many people will pay attention?

[Imago]

Before anybody gets their knickers in a twist, please actually read the article.

Bad headlines strike again.

This is a huge data collection, reporting, and management system. The website it merely the public element of the project.

If you break down the costs, it is an appropriate less than one percent of the entire stimulus package for reporting.