RAT Board Officially Announces Recovery.gov Redesign Contract, CAR Sends Letter Requesting Publication of Contract

[1]Despite the rest of the world learning about it on Wednesday [2], last Friday the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RAT Board) posted a press release [1] announcing the General Services Administration's awarding of the contract to redesign Recovery.gov. Notwithstanding its late appearance, the post is definitely a good thing, since it is the first time Recovery.gov has even acknowledged that the current site is effectively Recovery.gov 1.0. Before this, the redesign has never even been mentioned on the site.

However, the post leaves much to be desired. Although it links to the lengthy Statement of Objectives [3] for the site, which was not previously made public, the post is rather devoid of useful information. In fact, many of the news reports from last week have a great deal more information than the Recovery.gov press release does. Indeed, even after this post, many questions remain unanswered.

Posting the Recovery.gov redesign contract would answer a lot of these questions. To that end, yesterday, on behalf of the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery, OMB Watch's Executive Director, Gary Bass, sent Earl Devaney, the Chair of the RAT Board, a letter [4] requesting that he immediately make available:

• The contract with Smartronix to redesign Recovery.gov
• The contract or task order with CGI Federal to create FederalReporting.gov and
• Any other contracts related to the work of the Board

Additionally, Gary also requested that Devaney disclose the cost of the work being done by CGI Federal in creating FederalReporting.gov and implementing tools for recipient reporting.

We'll post an update to this blog when we get a response back from Devaney.

Interestingly, in what might be a foreshadowing of Devaney's response, at the same time we sent the letter, Devaney was on Federal News Radio [5], talking to Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris. Here's a relevant bit, where Devaney is discussing releasing the Smartronix contract:

"What we've got here is a new agency, the Recovery Board, and we have GSA, which of course does most of the contracting for the government. So what we have here is [that] we need to coordinate closely with GSA to ensure that what gets released is appropriate for release. Now, the contract itself is normally withheld during the bid protest period, and my understanding is that should be over next week -- and, at that point, I've asked them to consider releasing the contract immediately."

…

Devaney says, again, the hesitation to reveal [the contract on Recovery.gov] does not mean that anything is being hidden.

"There may be things in that contract that the company considers proprietary business information. That has to be looked at. Attorneys have to look at that. Normally this thing would go through a FOIA process. We're encouraging GSA not to put it through their FOIA process, but to just take a scan and look at it to -- once the biding protest period ends -- to get that contract up on recovery.gov."

Hopefully Devaney has enough pull to make that happen. As I noted in my last post [2] on this topic, Recovery.gov, the transparency website for the Recovery Act, is sadly lacking in transparency at the moment. But posting the contract would be a great improvement.