Agreed, but some of the sites are set to lose funding in a few weeks amid a febrile political atmosphere. My understanding is that the main expense areas are hosting/infrastructural overhead, developer salaries, and normal office/administrative overhead which is a fact of life in DC.

The pessimist in me thinks that keeping the inner workings of government in a state of murky obscurity furthers the interests of some more cynical politicians.

This is a good point, but actually most of the federal government is set to lose funding and shut down next week unless something happens in Congress.

Most of the federal government has been schedule to shut down "two weeks from now" for a while.

Again? I recall that was the issue some time ago.

There's no common sense to be found, especially on the GOP side. There are a number of money-saving programs that they're trying to significantly defund, which would end up costing more than they save.

For instance, funding for poison control call centers. Instead of just calling up a call center, people who are afraid they or their kid has been poisoned would have to go to the emergency room, which is far more expensive even if it's a false alarm.

They're just making piddly penny-wise, pound-foolish cuts that will barely scratch the deficit.

Whatever happens, it's not going to be "common sense prevailing". The Republicans have publicly painted themselves into a corner where no matter what Obama presents, they have to demand an absurd number of cuts to domestic discretionary spending. If you figure the current proposed budget is halfway-reasonable, that means that the Republicans have to insist on cutting good, cost-effective programs like this -- playing around at the margins isn't enough.

For some programs, you would have to think the cost of governments time debating it is greater than the total amount they are debating? It probably has a decent sunk startup cost to I assume?