Misleading headline, go read the RFP. It's a major multi-year project that includes 24/7 support (for years!). They are funneling in data from thousands of sources and trying to automate it. Plus have it searchable in a very public way. Hosted in multiple data centers. etc etc. To make it sound like they want a new template is simply incorrect.<p><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/16515421/RAT-Board-Solicitation" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/16515421/RAT-Board-Solicitation</a><p>The bulk of the development work has to be done very quickly too, which vastly complicates things.
Looks like it's being done by <a href="http://www.smartronix.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.smartronix.com</a><p>Let's hope it turns out better than their site, which doesn't look that great (to me), uses Flash, doesn't validate, and doesn't degrade gracefully when JS is disabled.
Or how about we take that 18M and fund a startup (or two) that could probably do recovery.gov plus a bunch of other public facing .govs<p>Not that I want the govt playing VC, just saying.