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1998 Called and Wants Its Government Website Back

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, April 20 2011

Oh, FAPIIS. The Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System joined the public Internet this week, and the Sunlight Lab's Tom Lee wonders if this might be "the worst government website we've ever seen":

It's unclear to me whether the programmers responsible for this interface had ever actually used the web or simply had it described to them. Either way, whoever built this should be embarrassed. Whoever managed the project should be embarrassed. Whoever signed off on delivery should be embarrassed! But we haven't even gotten to the worst part yet.

That's because while all of the above will be embarrassing to any developer who takes pride in his or her craft, the quality of a government website is ultimately less important than the data it exposes. And there is no FAPIIS data in FAPIIS. Not yet, anyway. Such data exists, mind you. But the decision was made not to include any historical data when FAPIIS went public. Presumably the contractors who did a bad job, and who were reported for doing so, are concerned that people might look at those reports and get the impression that, uh, they did a bad job. Others may be concerned that the database could cast them in a bad light and raise uncomfortable questions. That government caved in to the demands of these vendors -- vendors who are supposed to be serving government! -- can only be described as an act of craven capitulation. We've FOIAed for this data, and if we're lucky, perhaps we'll even get it. But it ought to be online right now.

In the comments, a CIO at NASA argues back that what we're seeing here may well simply be an internal federal site turned out for public use. That's not enormously comforting. Is this the site that government watchdogs are using to keep tabs on contractors? Though it does help us understand what Barack Obama means when he says complains that government IT is "horrible."

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