Recovery.Gov: Obama Team Redesigns Stimulus Site -- for $9.5M

The idea was transparency. If the Obama administration was spending $797 billion as stimulus money to jump-start the economy, end the recession and bring down the unemployment rate, U.S. taxpayers had a right to know where the money was going.

And so the White House started Recovery.gov, a Web site to let people do just that.

But it's a work in progress. The government's General Services Administration quietly put out a release Wednesday night saying the site would be redesigned -- for $9.5 million and, perhaps, as much as $18 million in the next five years.

After ABC News' Rick Klein posted the news Wednesday night, the comments flew. Nine million bucks for a Web site?

"I do think $9.5 million is a bit much," said Craig Jennings of OMB Watch, a watchdog group often critical of government spending. "They already have a large data set to work with. What Recovery.gov will do -- and whether they need $9.5 million to do this, I don't know -- is display it."

The site -- click here -- shows that as of July 3, $60.4 billion of stimulus money had been paid out to federal departments and state governments, to be spent on local projects -- construction, infrastructure and the like -- that would, ostensibly, pay off in the form of more jobs and more money to get the economy going again.

Is the government's stimulus plan enough to get the economy on track?