A short 27 days after announcing the RFP, yesterday the GSA awarded the Recovery.gov redesign contract to Smartronix, a Maryland firm. Smartronix was one of only three companies to submit bids, out of the 59 companies allowed to bid under the GSA's Alliant acquisition contract. The award is an exciting development, since the current iteration of Recovery.gov (built from a contract with REI Systems) is not very useful in tracking Recovery Act funds, so we're looking forward to a new and improved site. However, the project hasn't gotten off to a promising start.

Initially, we were pretty shocked by the cost of the contract, $9.5 million over the next seven months, with the possibility of an extension to a total of $18 million through 2014. To put that into perspective, when GSA set out to create USAspending.gov, we (OMB Watch) licensed them the technology underlying Fedspending.org for $600,000. And USAspending.gov draws on a much more complicated source of information (i.e. the entire federal budget), as opposed to the relatively simple recipient information Recovery.gov will be dealing with. With that experience in mind, starting from scratch on a website would conceivably cost only a couple million dollars, not $9.5 million.

That said, several sources have suggested that the increased price tag is the cost of such an expedited schedule. Affording to the timeline outlined by the RFP, Smartronix now has a scant 21 days to turn in a conceptual design, and the launch date is only August 27 of this year, which is only some 50 days away. Therefore, it is conceivable that the high cost is a function of how little time Smartronix has to turn around a finished product.

If this is the case, though, that the government is paying a premium for speed, GSA should have mentioned it. Unfortunately, this point further demonstrates how the RAT Board (the RAT Board is in charge of Recovery.gov, but GSA is administering this contract for the RAT Board) has not been very transparent about this process, a fact which has been true since the very beginning of the project. For instance, the redesign process has never been publicized on Recovery.gov; not the RFP and not this award. This is ironic, considering that Recovery.gov is supposed to be the pinnacle of transparency. Has no one at the RAT Board ever considered this fact?

The release of the redesign contract has only created more questions, the cost of the project being one of them. The RAT Board should post the contract onto Recovery.gov immediately, and describe how and why they awarded the contract to Smartronix. This is an important project, and it is apparently one for which the taxpayers will be paying a great deal of money. It deserves a similarly great deal of transparency.

There has been a great deal of coverage on this contract, so take your pick of article: Federal News Radio, The Examiner, InformationWeek, Federal Times, and Sunlight Labs (who originally tried to bid for this contract).