Smartronix is getting $9.5 million to redesign http://recovery.gov in 6 months. That’s $1.6 million a month. The contract could be worth up to $18 million over 5 years.

More details here: http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site.html

We expect Smartronix to be transparent in how they spend money, and are calling on them to unprotect their twitter updates, and tweet regularly on where the money is going and the progress of the project.

Recovery.gov is all about transparency in spending the stimulus funds, so it’s only reasonable that the contractor building the site make that process transparent too.

UPDATE 7/14 12:30pm ET: Smartronix has unprotected their Twitter updates and actually started tweeting. The released both a press release and statement with a lot of corporate speak that doesn’t say a whole lot. They will be working with KPMG, Synteractive, and TMP Government to make the site.