Emily Hulsey | On 04, Jan 2014
According to the government website FedBizOpps.gov, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division is spending $544,000 on a new LinkedIn profile:
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division is paying $544,000 for a shiny new LinkedIn profile, in the wake of a partial government shutdown that followed a top Democrat’s assurance that ‘the cupboard is bare, there’s no more cuts to make.’
The LinkedIn contract, first reported in the Washington Free Beacon, includes ‘Work With Us’ banner ads and ‘gold’-level user pages commonly purchased by private companies, all designed to drive job-seekers to Attorney General Eric Holder’s law enforcement agency.
The DOJ provided its contractor, the Reston, Virginia-based Carahsoft Technology Corporation, with a not-so-helpful table of prices for LinkedIn’s services, in which all the costs were listed as $0. The agency contracting officer responsible for the award did not respond to a request for an explanation.
While LinkedIn is free to use, it also offers paid plans that give organizations the opportunity to spice up their page and access several bells and whistles. However, it’s not incredibly extensive or complicated. To justify paying someone $544,000 for this is preposterous.
Suppose it takes Brogan & Partners, the consulting firm the DOJ has hired, 150 hours (and that’s a generous estimate) to redesign the profile, create some banner ads and write up some redirect pages. That comes out to $3,626 per hour!
Does it look like our government’s priorities are way off, or is it just me?
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/01/106256-justice-dept-spend-544000-wont-believe/
