Many recent news stories focused on the recent round of typos coming out of the White House and going to the press apparently without much vetting and with either no editing or some really poor editing if there was indeed any done. What surprises me is how much attention was paid to the typos without any consideration for the actual content of what was written.

Now I am no Web Design expert but I have worked exclusively on the Internet for the last five years and I would like to believe that in that amount of time, I have learned many different things. I have drawn up many plans for websites, written more Internet Content than I care to remember, written many proposals to have software created and done all of this for a livable wage even if I have never stood any risk of getting rich doing it.

So what is this all about?

Personally, I have never heard of any software costing someone more than a few thousand dollars and never over fifty thousand dollars … and that was for some really impressive software. I have seen some very nifty web pages designed and built and the most expensive one I have ever seen cost just at five thousand dollars.

Now while the typos are abhorrent coming from the White House and going to the Press without being checked by anyone who cared enough to actually do their job, that is not what I am asking here. I am asking what in the hell is there about the recovery.gov website that costs eighteen million taxpayer dollars.

Now I can already here all of the arguments about how this is going to include this cost and that but has anybody actually looked at these figures? I mean many small IT owners could retire on this single contract and be financially set for the rest of their life while they continue all of the maintenance and updates that would ever be needed.

I do not mind so much paying for the maintenance and upkeep of necessary infrastructure but for a website? Now take into consideration that our government is spending eighteen million dollars of our money on a single and relatively simple website to let us know that they are not wasting our money?! Does anybody else see the perverse irony in this?

Give me five thousand dollars and I can build the computer system of my dreams. Give me fifty thousand dollars and I can set up a server rack that would easily handle the traffic and needs of the recovery.gov website. Give me half a million dollars and I can set up a sweet system and keep it running until long after this administration is gone and people begin trying to forget about them.

Give me five million and I will take a couple of million and set the site up for life, outsource the upkeep and maintenance and then retire very well for the rest of my natural life. Eighteen frigging million dollars for a single website though? That is just so beyond uncalled for that it bears more than just a simple investigation. For the news services to believe that only the typos were truly newsworthy is indicative of why so many of them are dying out but to overlook such frivolous waste … being wasted to tell us how they are not wasting it … and to not even consider this in any of the articles … at least not in any of the articles I have seen so far.

What better way to inspire confidence in the people that you lead than to waste literally millions of dollars telling them how you are not going to waste any of their money. Joe Biden once said that nobody would be wasting taxpayer funds on his watch. Well Joe, it’s about time that you woke up and started watching because your boss is making the previous administration look like rank amateurs. Waste not want not? So if we waste enough … what can we expect in return?

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