You really think $33 million is a reasonable number for building a web interface to existing data? Please, hire me for your next job.
And I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/ireapps/census
Apparently, he/she does.
I really wish I could understand why, though. Government corruption and waste hurts us all. Why do some people blow it off so easily?
By the time IBM Federal got the project and could start coding, some bureaucracy of failure had already decided that $33M was a fair price for the specifications that they provided.
I know people who work on government projects like these. I know how the subcontractors are chosen. I can almost guarantee that the subcontractor who received this job had some special "in" with the decision maker on the government side through nepotism, trips to strip clubs, cash payouts, political connections, or something.
I suspect a lot of people opposed to "government" and "taxes" in some general sense have ulterior motives, mostly relating to libertarian ideology ("taxation is theft", etc.) or just plain not liking to pay taxes... as opposed to honestly assessing the efficiency of different organizations.