Remember when President Obama promised to end the culture of corruption and pay-to-play in our nation’s capital? Or when Congressional Democrats promised the most open, ethical, and honest Congress in history? As Jim Geraghty would say, all of their promises come with expiration dates.

ABC reports this morning that the Maryland firm Smartronix has won what seems like an enormous $18 million contract to re-design the Recovery.gov website. Approximately $9.5 million would be spent by January in order to make “Recovery 2.0? out of the site that is at least supposed track the spending of federal stimulus funds in detail.

Smartronix, a medium-sized Maryland-based firm (over 500 employees) founded in 1995, boasts a large number of government clients, mostly military. The company appears to have just one important political connection: according to FEC records, Smartronix president, Mohammed Javaid, vice president Alan Parris, and partner John Parris have together given $19,000 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D) since 1999.

Something smells fishy here. It costs $18 million for a website that tracks how money is being spent…from one piece of legislation? $18 million? For that cost, the website better be capable of crapping diamonds. Unless of course that’s how much web designers get paid for their work, in which case I’m clearly in the wrong industry. But I kind of doubt that that’s the case.

The question now is how much competition there was for the large Recovery.gov contract. As Ed Morrissey points out, Smartronix got $47 million in federal contracts for FY 2007, and only $132,000 of that amount came from open, multi-bid contracts. It would seem that Smartronix has some friends in Washington making sure it gets the large, over-priced contracts with little effort or competition.