Redesigning Recovery.gov: What's in the contract?

Criticism and questions are being generated in the awarding of a contract to redesign the federal Web site that will allow the public to track exactly how stimulus funds are spent.

In less than 30 days after announcing the RFP, the General Services Administration yesterday awarded the contract to redesign Recovery.gov to Smartronix for $9.5 million over the next seven months, with the possibility of an extension to $18 million through 2014.

While that sounds like, and is, a lot of money, that's not the biggest concern to Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

"The real problem for me is that we don't know what we're getting," Brito tells FederalNewsRadio. "The contract itself has not been released by GSA."

Brito is the creator of OpenRegulations.org, his own version of the government's regulatory docketing system, Regulations.gov, and the co-creator of the website, Stimulus Watch, his version of Recovery.gov.

Brito tells the Federal Drive he wrote to GSA yesterday asking for a copy of the contract. "They got back to me last night saying 'you need to file a FOIA request'."

Brito says the biggest problem with Recovery.gov can be found, or rather not found, on the site itself.

"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."

Once the work is done, whatever that will be, Brito doesn't expect it to be worth the fuss or the $18 million.

"The RAT (Recovery Accountability and Transparency) Board has promised that they are in fact going to release all of the raw data. If they keep that promise, what I expect to see are dozens of recovery.govs pop up at no cost to the public that are probably going to be better than what Recovery.gov gives us. We'll see, and I don't know what's in that contract yet, but that's what I expect."

While Brito is worried about the amount of money that is being spent in the Web site redesign, others in the field believe that the money is serving a purpose.

"It could very well be that the site does a lot of great stuff. We could be getting a very excellent site and we could be getting the site pretty quickly," Craig Jennings, the senior policy analyst at OMB Watch, said in an interview with the Daily Debrief' Chris Dorobek.

"One of the tradeoffs for getting a web site up is speed. If they're going to have programmers working on this 24 hours a day, they are going to have to pay a premium for that."

According to Jennings, the RAT board is under a lot of pressure to get the site implemented in the time that the government is pushing for.

"One thing everyone needs to keep in mind when we are talking about recovery.gov -- the act was signed just six months ago," Jenning said. "This is a website designed to track some five billion dollars in spending."

"The federal government is not really proactive in getting any federal government spending contracts up anyway. So, starting with the recovery.gov redesign contract would be a great first step."

Jennings still believes that the government is moving in the right direction.

"Within the federal government there's also the regular appropriations which are a trillion dollars a year in discretionary spending that is not totally being tracked right now. I think we are witnessing the beginning of a change in how the federal government produces data on the spending."

"There is a lot of information that can be put forward and now we need to make sure that it is."

-----
On the Web:

Recovery.gov - www.recovery.gov

Wall Street Journal - Contract to Upgrade Recovery.gov Stimulates Criticism

FederalNewsRadio - Smartronix wins Recovery.gov redesign contract

(Copyright 2009 by FederalNewsRadio.com. All Rights Reserved.)