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If we're thinking about cutting costs and being realistic in how the government #spendsourmoney...
For more than two decades (and it's hard to admit that) I have been involved in technology, software development, and hosting in one form or fashion. One thing that really bothers me is how much money is wasted on our "web-based applications and sites.
Let's take the healthcare exchange for example. Has anyone actually checked to see how much the #USGovernment has spent on Healthcare.gov?
Back in September 2014, Bloomberg published an article that says that the federal government has spent about $2.1 billion on the enrollment system.
To put this into perspective, the ACA was signed into law in March of 2010. This means that over 4 years and 6 months, the government spent $2.1 billion dollars on a website. 54 months. This comes to about $38,888,888 a month.
Granted, there are a lot of costs in this, but more than $38,000,000 per month? Let's get real. Let's say that 1/2 of that was spent on hardware and hosting each month. Now, that is A LOT of hardware, but let's stick with that. This leaves us $19,444,444 per month to be used for payroll, administrative, office space, and all that other good stuff.
If you spent $1 MN a month on office space, another $1 MN in other necessities, and another $1 MN on administrative fees this still leaves you more than $16 MN a month for payroll and related expenses (ironically healthcare, taxes, and medicare/social security)
Alright, we're now down to $16 MN dollars. Let's break this down for the development of this whole system.
If you're paying your developers on the upper end of the average salary for 2010-1014 and add a cushion to it, that would be about $175,000 per year base, with another $62,000 in payroll burden expenses for a grand total of $237,000 per developer per year which translates into roughly $20,000 per month. We know that assistants, and receptionists, and tons of other staff are going to make less than this, but to make this easy, let's say everyone is paid this much.
If you are looking at $16,444,444 per month in available funds for payroll, and you're averaging $20,000 per month for your staff (which is WAY WAY WAY overkill), this would allow you to employ about 822 people.
822 employees working on this webpage. Let that sink in for a minute.
Assuming 1 admin staffer per every 5 staffers that would give you about 685 developers and 137 administrative staff.
685 developers. I mean, let's be realistic here. 685 developers should have been able to build dozens and dozens of websites over a 4 year period.
This doesn't even take into account all of the state exchanges. I know that the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that by 2011 the federal government had already spent nearly $4.7 billion to implement the exchanges. One year later. Over $4.7 billion dollars.
Between the two programs, they spent $6.8 billion dollars on websites.
There is every bit of $5 billion dollars that could have been spent on school lunches, road repairs, or any number of other things that could actually have made significant improvements to the lives of every day Americans.
Yeah, the government needs accountability... Now.
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