FAIL: Republican Brags about Watchdog Website – But it’s not a Website

House Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL) was recently cited as having launched a new VA Accountability Website. The only problem is that no one told Rep. Miller it was not, in fact, a website.

Ironically, this comes on the heels of House Republicans and Fox News hammering the Obama Administration about its failure to create a functional Healthcare.gov website.

Apparently, the Obama Administration is not the only crew of politicians and bureaucrats who are unable to catch up with technology and its terminology.

According to Government Executive, Rep. Miller has taken VA misspending and irresponsible bonus allocations to task.

The article, House Backs Bill to Cut VA Bonuses, highlights how VA has proven itself to be unable to be responsible stewards of American tax dollars.

To publicize the bad decision-making, Rep. Miller was reported to have created a new website called VA Accountability Watch.

House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., who launched a website in September to track VA’s “lack of accountability” in awarding bonuses, previously introduced a bill to eliminate entirely performance awards for VA’s senior executives.

Upon further inspection, however, Rep. Miller’s website is nothing more than a single web page on an already existing website.

For some of you, this may seem like splitting hairs.  You would be right if the federal government, including Congress, was not pissing away billions in taxpayer dollars on “websites” that are nothing more than WordPress style blog post.

To give an example, VA paid a marketing company between $150k-$250k to manage around five web pages that basically already existed. The company participated in planning, logo design, etc for the Office of Tribal Government Relations web pages.

In exchange, they were paid what would an extremely good salary for two people to design more than just a website. At $125k per year, most companies would get well more than design and planning for a few web pages.

Now, would you say the company is responsible for creating a website? No, they may have created a couple web pages at most.

On that note, I would be curious to see how much the House Committee spent on creating their new “website” [sic] for Rep. Miller’s pet project.

Over the past week, I have been reading through numerous contracts where VA is paying hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for website type development.

VA has paid at least $12ml in some of the strangest public relations moves I have read to day. I will report on those as I gather more information.

VA paid $35k for a 25-page PDF document that is hosted on a web page. They paid $9k for a brochure template, and still another $5k for a PowerPoint template.

Based on their own numbers that I have seen thus far, my own website DisabledVeterans.org would be worth between $2ml to $5ml.

It is obvious that I will never make the kind of money as a lawyer that government contractors make hammering on a keyboard in one afternoon.

What I have seen looks like nothing more than a fancy way to justify glad-handing money from the government into private coffers.

There is a name for that. It’s called money laundering.

Sadly, the primary part of Congress responsible for holding the Executive Branch accountable for its willy-nilly use of tax dollars does not know the difference between a website and a blog post.

When the fox is watching the henhouse, it is no wonder that we are in debt up to our eyeballs with nothing but a defunct country to show for it – chicken feathers but no chickens.