Recovery.gov in the News Again

Back in February, I was excited to find out that the Obama administration was using Drupal for the high-profile recovery.gov site. I was so excited in fact, I even blogged about it:
Recovery.gov and Drupal. Well, recovery.gov is back in the news, this time framed as an $18million boondoggle.

Initially, despite being dumbfounded by where that much money was going to be spent, I was still hopeful that we would see the existing site improved with new data, more visualization options, etc. And I even wondered if some of the improvements would find their way back into Drupal itself. Yes, I was optimistic.

But then I made a trip over to the Web site for Smartronix Inc., the new prime contractor for recovery.gov. Their site layout has a fixed height, is implemented with a table-based layout, and has a lot of links ending in .aspx. To put it in Slashdot terms: 1999 called, and it wants its non-resizable, table-based layout back.

Now who knows, maybe they will use that $18million to expand the existing site while keeping Drupal and continuing to use semantic markup and a beautiful design that fits so well with the Obama branding. But early signs seem to point to this being highly unlikely.