Originally Posted by nation-x

It's obvious to me that you idiots have never dealt with a consulting firm or run a really large mainstream site. I am not really defending the spending... but $18M for a 5 year contract to build, service and maintain a website like recovery.gov is fairly common in the corporate world. About 9 years ago (right before 9/11) I was being payed almost $20k/month to build and run a site for Herman Miller and that didn't include hosting or data entry.... and I beat other bidders by almost 50% by bidding $125/hour @ 160 hours/month. $18M over 5 years is $1875/hour based on full time hours (160/month). If you add a couple of developers, hosting, equipment, data entry people and managers to run the project... those numbers are reasonable.