Irony: The $18 million contract to build a website to make federal stimulus spending transparent was released – with entire pages blacked out.
So much for change we can believe in:
Back in July, a software company named Smartronix landed an $18 million contract to build a Web site where taxpayers could easily track billions in federal stimulus money. It was just another part of the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to bring transparency to stimulus spending, we were told.
But it seems the drive for transparency doesn’t cover the contract itself.
After weeks of prodding by ProPublica and other organizations, the General Services Administration released copies of the contract and related documents that are so heavily blacked out they are virtually worthless.
Don’t believe us? Take a look.
ProPublica sought the contract under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what kind of site Smartronix planned to build and to assess whether it justified the cost, which Republican critics of the stimulus plan called “unreal.”
Ed Pound, the director of communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, defended the redactions as “legitimate.” The Web site Smartronix is to build will replace Recovery.gov, the existing stimulus Web portal run by the transparency board.
“I’m not concerned about whether journalists are concerned about this,” Pound said. “We have been very transparent.”
The GSA declined to comment, but said in its response to ProPublica’s FOIA request that such redactions were allowed if material “involves substantial risk of competitive injury” to a contractor.
Some sections of the contract were redacted in their entirety. They include:
- the project’s management structure;
- something called the “Strategic Advisory Council”;
- quality assurance procedures;
- five pages on user experience;
- site navigation;
- four unidentified pages on which everything, even section headings, have been redacted;
- every single piece of information in the document’s pricing table, including function, vendor, model, part ID, detail and quantity;
- the contract’s warranty agreement.
In all, 25 pages of a 59-page technical proposal — the main document in the package — were redacted completely. Of the remaining pages, 14 had half or more of their content blacked out.