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US Gov. Launches Web Site To Track IT Spending
andy1307 writes "Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, announced on Tuesday a new Web site designed to track more than $70 billion in government IT spending, showing all contracts held by major firms within every agency. The (Flash-heavy) site, USAspending.gov, shows detailed information about whether IT contracts are being monitored and budgets being met. The data also show which contracts were won through a competitive process or in a no-bid method (the latter approach is criticized by good-government advocates for excluding firms from business opportunities). Each prime contractor is listed as well as the status of that project; sub-contractors are not yet shown."
Wow this is great.... now what about a detailed log of other governmental spending? Be nice to know where those orders for $20,000 toilet seats are coming out of.
How much did they pay for the SCO licenses for Linux ?
What? No field to track kickbacks and bribes.... That's lame.
of that $70 billion was spent developing that site? :p
2 NEW YORK STATE DEPT OF HEALTH NY $18,335,672,042 Percent of total: 5.764%
3 TEXAS HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES COMMISSION TX $13,514,862,175 Percent of total: 4.248%
4 PENNSYLVANIA DEPT OF PUBLIC WELFARE PA $11,168,181,944 Percent of total: 3.511%
The other states fall in at around or less than 1%. I understand those states are high population but that should mean more tax income to the state. So you're telling me that someone who lives in Minnesota is paying Federal taxes to support New York Health Dept and Texas Human Services Dept? I really don't like that when states like Texas are all about "smaller government" and "lower taxes" or that people flock to NYC to be at the "center of the world" yet their taxes don't reflect that cost and other states pick it up. So what, you just shift your debt off to other states and freeload on Federal relief? From the data, around 2007 this started becoming a huge disparity between states. Why? You switched to Vista? Ridiculous.
My work here is dung.
..and I've been putting off filling in *my* Project Status Reports...
If you don't like flash here's another view of the Federal IT Budget:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/vue-it/index.html
I'm not sure if it's the same data but it let you have the raw data too.
------ http://timothylive.net
It looks good on paper. However this is what happens.
First lets stop and realize there is a deal of stress and frustration to have to deal with different people all the time (contractors) and it is generally easier and safer to deal with the same people (you know the level you can trust them and you know their quality of their work etc... All in all makes it easier to manage them).
That said IT managers of government agencies really don't want to put stuff out to bid. As it is a lot of work for them, they have to battle with the Union first to make a case for their need (normally with all their staff saying I don't want to do this) for hiring outsiders to do the work. Then you need to make a full spec and then put it out to bid get the best bid and then when the people start they will start out slower because they don't know your work. (Turnover cost is about 150% more then using the same people)
So what happens? Well they make 1 or 2 actual completive bids for some small projects and see if they like the people. Once they know them and like them and get to know their skill sets for the next larger project they word the bid to match that persons skill sets so the person who meets the requirements is the person they look for. That is why if you look at these bids that come out there is a lot of very odd requirement say for a Web project asking for 13 years of Cobol Experience or Linux experience for making a Windows app. Then they used that canned bid over and over again to keep them there.
Why use contractors at all? Because the Union allows the people to say no to any job they don't want to do. And a lot of jobs are based on Bad Ideas which are very political, but really doomed to failure. So you get the contractor to do it. If it fails then it is the evil contractors fault. But you hire him again because you really know the project was doomed anyways. The contractor is fine to be the bad guy if you keep hiring him again.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is a good first step towards accountability.
Personally, I'd like to vote on the overall budget expenditures for the big 20 departments. We shouldn't be surprised when departments and programs we love don't get much funding while others we dislike very much do. Most citizens don't have any valid idea how much money goes into any program. Most think we spend 50% on the military and 10% on NASA. Those numbers were significantly lower a few years ago (22%/0.5%). The thing that bothers me most is Social Security is like 55% of the total budget. That's just crazy. Wild swings in spending shouldn't be allowed even if we vote. No more than a 5% change in any department per year, so they can smoothly transition to the next annual budget amounts up or down.
We need to carefully monitor http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/investments-rated-agency until all of them are reporting. Only a few (less than 5) out of 30+ departments are currently reporting.
Perhaps I'm crazy.
Why leave off California?
Sorry, I didn't see the "CA" to the right of it, it's just titled "Department of Health Care Services" and I thought it was a Federal institution.
Thank you for that taxfoundation.org link, very informative if the data is accurate!
I started reading this thread hoping to see some funny posts about Govt spending... But once again I'm made aware of the fact that people involved in Govt work seem to be lacking a sense of humor.
Make a federal job board where independent contractors can easily submit quick bids where they will work directly under a government boss. The big IT contractors would hate that, but there is no reason why most IT projects need to have a huge contractor support apparatus, instead of having a highly paid government program manager directly control the contractors. 1099s are also a lot cheaper when the government can hire them directly. Even if they have to pay say... $150/hr for a senior developer, that's usually a lot less than a big contractor firm with all of its overhead costs would charge the government.
Everyone's afraid of "fraud, waste and abuse" if the bid process isn't some hyper-complicated kabuki, but the federal government actually wastes more money going through this process. It loses it by losing an opportunity to directly negotiate with smaller companies and independent contractors, and it loses it based on having to have more employees to ensure compliance. The truth is, if the federal government had the flexibility to easily hire 1099s without much oversight, as long as they're reasonably competent, it'll save money no matter what over hiring companies like Lockheed, Boeing and Northrop.
Be nice to know where those orders for $20,000 toilet seats are coming out of.
It'd be nice to know what those $20,000 toilet seats really are- they ain't toilet seats. It's basically fraud/money laundering; the $19980 goes somewhere else, or "toilet seat" is code for "1 ton bomb guidance system to be shipped to somewhere it shouldn't be" or "rocket motor for an ejection seat for a super top secret plane".
Please help metamoderate.
Hey smart guy... when were those considered "IT spending?"
But where would the campaign funds come from then? A 1099 is not going to donate millions of dollars to political campaigns every year.
Got Code?
I went poking around, and almost immediately found, marked in red for "Significant Concerns", the following project:
CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN COMPLEX/TACTICAL WARNING - ATTACK ASSESSMENT
.
Yes, this site is great for watchdog groups that can do research, but this data has been available since the 80's and the reason people 'never cared about accountability' is because the data was never compiled. This website shows a 'slick' web2.0 presentation, but the data is still not compiled--I think the IRS booklets we get for tax day have better information (i.e. compiled data) where one can say: 'we're wasting money' or 'my money is well spent'. This website is pushing us to the typical Web2.0 self-service mentality such that gov't becomes less accountable as the data is presented (not compiled) and YOU need to do the analysis/searching/data mining. And of course, the gov't wonks continue to get their high salaries, with less work and no questions asked...
And of course, sure there's lots of data, but is anything actionable? That's the most valuable thing gov't IT can do for its citizens, empower them:i.e. can't you take action on this site (submit a comment, conduct a poll, etc...)? Nope.... I waiting for the people to get upset at gov't spending and the response will be: "well the data is posted, not our fault you didn't track it for so long.".
When it comes to gov't spending, they are ultimately accountable (by our vote), but this approach bring more democracy into the game and now the blame is shared.
Good to know even the 'new bosses' are in the pocket of proprietary software monopolies.
The Dakotas are bigtime welfare states that is why. They have the largest airforce base and the largest concentration of nukes to take care of. The rest is farmland which also gets a lot of welfare. Take out the military spending and they'd have no economy outside the university towns.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This is great! Finally we get to see all of the smiths that get federal dollars. (Did anyone notice the negitive amounts by various smiths? WTF?)
I can't do anything directly with the info but it's extremely refreshing to see that it's here available for all to see.
Given that I work for the government, and have to deal with the IT spending regulations, I thought you all might like an actual example of how this works.
Scenario: The keyboard I am using broke. I want a new keyboard. Our tech checks our budget and finds we have some IT money. (Any IT spending has to be earmarked as such, when requesting grant money to begin with; if we have no IT money we can't buy anything computer related, no matter how much actual cash we have left to spend total.)
I pick the keyboard I want (Apple wired keyboard, with number pad - because according to our CIO Bluetooth is a "wireless device" and thus can't be allowed in the building for fear someone will steal my precious data).
Our tech submits a request for purchase. The minions in the purchasing department check the request, check our budget, and then if everything is kosher they submit it for bids using a government ordering website.
Approved companies make bids based on the equipment requested. "Approved" means any company vetted by the government to be a company that does not support or have dealings with enemies of the US, and companies that are minority-owned or woman-owned or qualify for some other feel-good-PC affirmative-action equal-opportunity category-owned are preferred. If an approved company exists which can make the bid, great. We collect bids. If there is no such company (for example, a supplier exists but is not yet in the approved list) we have more paperwork to get the supplier checked out and added to the list of potential approved companies prior to obtaining bids.
The lowest bid is generally the one accepted. When this happens, the order is placed. Purchasing arranges payment, the supplier arranges delivery, and in only a short matter of about a month my new keyboard arrives. The paperwork in the end, on our part, was seven or eight sheets of paper including the order forms, the copies of the bids, the budget justifications, etc. (Good thing the Paperwork Reduction Act was implemented, I'd hate to see how bad it was before that!)
Effectively, what just happened is that I wanted an Apple keyboard, so the federal government paid a third party to place an order with Apple to ship the keyboard to me. The packing slip even had the Apple Store order number included. Same thing happens when we want a Dell or an HP computer - a third party places the order with Dell or HP, we can't simply call up Apple or Dell or HP and make the order ourselves, because if we did that, the third-party supplier wouldn't be able to take a cut of the costs.
Because of this, we quite often have problems when we want specific items, such as customizing computers to meet specific needs. Or, in my case, desiring a keyboard with a number pad. I am now the proud owner of a government-purchased Apple keyboard, sans number pad, thanks to the federal IT purchasing process. Forget about returning it - that would take even more paperwork than the ordering did.