Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Serious Design Failure At USAspending.gov?

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-tax-dollars-at-work dept.

theodp writes "Over at Intelligent Enterprise, Seth Grimes declares the Federal Government's USAspending.gov website a travesty, calling it 'almost a parody of a government-transparency site.' Among the faults cited by Grimes is a botched 'Federal Spending FY 2009 YTD' pie chart that graced USAspending.gov's home page. Not only were the sizes of pie segments not in proportion to the percentage labels (due to a Google Chart API error), the colors in the pie chart didn't even match the colors and values in the table immediately below the chart. Lucky for the Feds, Grimes didn't get a chance to look behind the curtain at the Federal IT Dashboard, where they forgot to remove a (commented) reference to a Google spreadsheet that states 'These totals are pretty poor numbers' (Google workbook). Oops!"

3 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. urlfail by Canazza · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Why do I care about the details of US Snake-bummers?

    --
    It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
  2. Re:I'm a conservative by Runaway1956 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    ASSuming that your claim about the "death panels" were correct - that would be worse than the present corporate death panels, HOW?

    Face it, Bubba. When the insurance companies decide that you are no longer profitable, they can cut you off anytime. The only thing stopping them is PR.

    --
    "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  3. Re:Criticize inexperience and naivette by mi · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    It's more of a failure of the "Office of E-Government & Information Technology" than a failure of the man himself.

    Right. And our problems in Iraq were due to Pentagon's incompetence — nothing to do with Bush... What happened to "The Buck Stops Here" attitude? Appointing a "czar" does not lift responsibility... Sorry, the executive is responsible for everything — if a particular failure is not his fault directly, then his fault is in hiring the wrong person. This is why CEOs get paid big bucks...

    But Obama has never been an executive — except for the aforementioned charity, which failed in its mission to improve Chicago's public schools. Seriously. That's it... He's been an employee (a lawyer), and a law-maker (simply voting "present" most of the time, though). He never ran anything...

    Seriously though, do you really think McCain would have done better at this?

    I don't know, what McCain would've done on this — as things stand, having this web-site up is worse than not having it at all.

    Although McCain was a lackluster candidate, he certainly has more life experience than Obama. If he thought, that such a web-site is necessary/useful, I'm pretty sure, he would've been better at appointing qualified people to create it. One needn't be "technologically advanced" in person to be able to do this — witness Rupert Murdoch's success with MySpace, for example.

    And if McCain ever felt wanting in executive experience, Sarah Palin alone — having been a mayor and a State Governor — has more of that than Obama and Biden together... But the electorate was better informed of the gaffes attributed to her (she never claimed seeing Russia from her window — Tina Fey's character on SNL said that), than of Biden's real idiocies (such as: "When we, along with France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon...") and past plagiarism.

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.