I downvoted this comment. I work in the government transparency space, and I can tell you I think these tools are incredibly useful. Overall, if you do some dee

I downvoted this comment. I work in the government transparency space, and I can tell you I think these tools are incredibly useful. Overall, if you do some deep diving into what data.gov actually costs the answer is -- as always that it depends. If you look at just the technology and infrastructure costs, Data.gov itself costs about a half million dollars a year to run. Layer on staff time and you're looking at roughly double that. A week ago, I spoke with the Data.gov team, which now consists of 4 FTEs: an evangelist, a person whose job it is to get agencies to put their data on data.gov, a program manager (who basically manages the contractors, REISystems and Socrata), and 1/5th of Sonny Bhagowalia's time. Based on the work of this team, Data.gov has generated a significant ROI. For example: when I was at the Sunlight Foundation, we held a contest called Apps for America to promote Data.gov which offered 25,000 to the developer who built the best app on top of data.gov data. One of the winners was an app called GovPulse.us which took the Federal Register and built a website around the data. The Federal Register is the official journal of the united states. It's where all the public notices and stuff go -- so making that data more accessible is important, and making it so people can sort through it and link to it is also important. But ideological issues around transparency aside -- a few weeks after the contest concluded, the Government Printing Office issued an RFP looking for someone to build a new website for the Federal Register. With some work, the fellows that built GovPulse.us (which is open source) were called in to help build FederalRegister.gov, at a fraction of the cost of what the government intended. Based on what the federal government usually spends on websites -- That single event of adopting open source software and repurposing it -- probably saved the government upwards of ten million dollars -- far more than what's spent on Data.gov. Another company, BrightScope.com, is able to use data.gov data to build a platform for pension analysis. While their tax revenues are probably not paying for data.gov, they are a strong, growing business generating wealth for its shareholders and employees. When government open data has the opportunity to mature, it does this. Your weather reports, GPS data, and flight data usually come from government data sources which are beginning to become accessible via data.gov. Startups ought to be outraged by this for this reason alone. The fact is, there are THOUSANDS of opportunities to build businesses off of government data. SEC Filings, TIGER maps, Census data, BLR Statistics -- there's a tremendous opportunity here for a program that's operating inside the margins of government expense and has likely paid for itself many times over already. Cutting the program, or saying it doesn't work means you aren't paying attention to either current performance, or future potential. Both of which are just fine.