The federal government has never been known as the best money manager in the world, nor has the TSA ever been accused of being extremely competent. However, when you create the simplest iPad app ever, and spend $1.4 million doing it, people want answers.
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Here’s what the app does: Point left or right randomly…Yup, that’s it! And to make it even more crazy, a novice coder could write it in as little as 10 minutes!
Here is this brilliant app in action!
The good people over at Gizmodo decided to look into this a bit and said the following:
In the video below Android developer Chris Pacia takes a crack at building the Randomizer himself, and gets the whole thing done in just over ten minutes. Pacia notes that his usual rate for app development is $100 per hour, meaning the TSA overpaid by around $1,399,990.
Kevin Burke, who initially filed a FOIA to learn more about the Randomizer, wrote in a blog post that expenses for the project were not itemized. Another site speculated that some of that $1.4 million might have gone towards hardware and training. What we do know is that at least $336,000 of the money went into the development of an app that does nothing but show an arrow pointing in one of two directions.
Here’s the referenced video:
Not surprisingly, the TSA claims everyone is wrong and that the app only cost $47,400. Even that price could be a stretch, but that would assume you trust those numbers to begin with.
What say you? Who’s telling the truth? Sound off in the comments below!
