Recovery.gov $18m is not that shocking but as Sunlight Labs says transparency is a must. It must be from ALL parties.

People on twitter are all buzzing about how $18M Being Spent to Redesign Recovery.gov Web Site and at first glance that does sound like an insane amount of money.

According to the GSA, Recovery.gov will be rebuilt over the course of five months for a total of $9,516,324. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board then has the option to exercise options that can take the contract through 4 more years for a total of $17,948,518.

While I am shocked by the $9.5m in the first five months I’m certainly not shocked by $8.4 million to manage and maintain a government site for four years. I have done enough government work to know that warrenty commitments, change requests, uptime guarentees and managing a client in a bureaucratic culture costs a lot of money.

Sunlight Labs hits the nail on the head when they say:

The real problem is transparency. The real problem is that while many are outraged at the cost, you can’t presume that the government isn’t spending its money wisely unless you know both what Government is paying and what they’re paying for. We don’t know what they’re paying for, yet.

I hope that this gets rectified soon and that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, along with Smartronix works with our community to make sure of three things:

1. That people know what every dime of that $18MM is being spent on,
2. That Smartronix works with the community to make the process of building Recovery.gov open and transparent, and
3. That Smartronix works with the Sunlight Labs community to make the data published on Recovery.gov accessible and machine readable to developers.

That last point is a little self serving but I’m willing to let that slide.

My two cents on this whole thing is that facilitating this transparency should be mostly on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board plate. The public servants should serve the public. This transparency also needs to apply to the processes and commitments of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board as well as to the work of the vendor,Smartronix.

So let the people know what their government is doing in addition to letting them know how their tax money is being spent.