Thanks to platforms like Twitter and Facebook, rumors like the one about the Recovery.gov website costing $46 million can spread like wildfire these days. The only problem is, not all of them are true. Not even the ones on Truemors, ironically enough.

In case you haven't heard the story, tweet, complaint, status update, blog post, comment, radio bit, or email talking point, it goes something like this: "Can you believe the website that is supposed to track government waste costs $46 million. $46 million for a website! WTF?"

Recovery.gov is of course the government's main interface and tool for tracking the spending of the monumental $787 billion stimulus package passed back on February 17, 2009. On Thursday, the site's data went live for the first time, marking the start of the fulfillment of President Obama's promise to keep close tabs on the so-called Recovery spending, and to make the spending publicly available.

Rumor had it that the site was going to cost $46 million to build — an astounding figure in the minds of most for a website. In reality, the total value of the contract for designing, building, populating, and monitoring Recovery.gov is $18 million spread over five option years. Winners of the contract included a team of system engineers, graphics designers, information architects, data visualization firms and consultants, project managers, auditors, cybersecurity gurus, and marketers from Smartronix, TMP, KPMG, and Synteractive, with Smartonix as the prime contractor.

Thus far, only about half of the money has been obligated for spending while teams of programmers, engineers, and designers work tirelessly to meet the federal government's ambitious deadline of having the site built from conception to public-ready in four months time. Having just performed our own web redesign—a process that was supposed to take three months and took nine instead—OhMyGov can attest to the hard work required to meet the long list of requirements set forth by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees the spending program. 

On the other hand, as a taxpayer, this is exactly the expeditious work we want to see out of our government—even if the sweat came from the contractors' backs. After all, if Congress can spend the money in less than a month, shouldn't they be capable of tracking it in less than four?

We're in the process of testing the Recovery.gov and interviewing some of the creators of the project. Staye tuned for more insights into the Recovery site, the process by which it was developed, and the politics behind it in upcoming articles on OhMyGov.

In the meantime, you can find more information about the scope and scale of this "website" by reading through the actual contracting documents.