So the drive for privatisation and contract out all government task, as driven and controlled by lobbyists is working well for the US. One wonders how much it would have cost if done internally by full time employees with lobbyist interaction.
So is this government waste or typical corrupt private corporation manipulation of government spending ie the privatisation campaign dollar at work. So who drove the project, who employed that individual, were they a 'political' appointee.
This is most certainly government waste, I can't blame the private companies for taking a chance to get way overpaid. I would say this is either one of two things, the first being the person in charge of awarding the contract(s) to a company they got along with the best and also had a cost closest to what was budgeted. I have heard so many first hand stories of those in the government making sure to spend all money in a budget for fear of the budget being cut, there is no benefit to cutting costs apparently. My second guess is the contract was awarded to companies run/own/invested in by buddies of whoever was in charge of the contract without worrying if they were qualified, similar to how the White House got Solyndra their loan even with warnings that the company was doomed.
If on the off chance the person in charge of awarding the contract was not doing either of those things then this is a prime example of management making decisions on things they have NO CLUE about. I can guarantee if I were to mention to some of my developer friends that I could get a contact for such basic work for such extreme fees that they would bust out laughing at how much the contract awarder was overpaying. Seriously, this is the results you can get with non-technical management making technical management decisions, they have no idea what it takes to complete such a project and figure since magic wizards developers are involved they are getting a good deal even though they are getting hugely ripped off.
Even though the project is pretty pointless I think a better alternative would have been to offer the gig kind of like an internship to a college student or team of students. The project is so simple that I don't see why even only one student would have a problem completing an app for each platform and offer either a small stipend or even let the developer keep one of each of the 3 platforms phones for free to do with as they wish. I am usually not an advocate for working semi-free but when I was nearing graduating college I would have jumped at the chance to get some great real world experience for a widely known organization like OSHA and get to expand my mobile device development skills as well as pick up some cool electronics in the deal. I mean seriously this would only take working a few nights for a few weeks and some weekends as well, there is an API to get GPS information so that is dead easy to grab, it is trivial to use a GPS coordinate to query for temperature in that region, and then you would just have to add in a small collection of information/warning messages. Sounds like a perfect project for a younger developer looking for experience.