NY’s Covid app padded consultants’ pockets with tax dollars
Millions of New Yorkers recently woke up to a message on their phone — from an app they most likely forgot they ever even downloaded.
“Because demand for instant access to vaccine records has subsided, the NYS Wallet App will be discontinued on July 28, 2023,” the push notification read.
Just barely two years after its launch, the vaccine passport app — a relic of New York’s covid police state — was dead.
It could have been a cause for celebration for liberty-loving New Yorkers, had we not spent an eye-watering $64 million on the app. Instead, the grotesque government spending should make the blood of every taxpayer boil.
Back in May 2021, then Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled the so-called Excelsior Pass — a Covid passport app — pitching it as a more convenient and effective alternative to carrying around a physical vaccine card to gain entry to venues, restaurants and gyms under New York City’s severe Covid restrictions.
The app, the governor said, represented “one step closer to reaching a new normal.” It was downloaded by 11.5 million New Yorkers — but its use case was never all that clear.
Why did we need a special app when we could just carry around the little white CDC vaccine card or just keep a photo of it on our phones?
There was a dystopian creepiness to scanning a QR code connected to a state database just to have a workout at the gym or grab a bite to eat at a restaurant. That is, if the notoriously glitchy app even worked in the first place.
But the Excelsior Pass’s biggest problem was its price tag.
How did New York end up forking over $64 million for an ill-conceived app? The answer is simple: taxpayers with no meaningful recourse were the ones footing the bill.
When the app was first announced, it was slated to cost a mere $2.5 million. Within a couple months, it swelled to a reported $17 million thanks to mission creep, as the state toyed with the idea of expanding its applications to stand in for driver’s licenses, proof of age and other medical records.
Until its cancellation — and even though virtually nobody has been using the app now that vax mandates are largely a thing of the past — the state had been paying $200,000 a month just to maintain the database of vaccine records.
The budget explosion represents an amazing 25-fold increase from the original plan. So, where did all that money go?
To “consulting,” of course. After IBM secured a three-year contract with the state to roll out the app, Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte reportedly also got in on the action.
How exactly these mega-corporations managed to hoover up so much taxpayer money is now the subject of an investigation by the state Office of the Inspector General.
It’s a tale as old as time here in New York. In fact, earlier this year it was revealed that the city spent twice as much on consultants working on a Second Avenue subway tunnel than they did actually digging the tunnel itself.
But it’s also an issue in liberal cities across the country. In Los Angeles, building apartments for the homeless swelled from a $350,000 per unit cost all the way up to $837,000 a pop — far outstripping the average home value in the United States — thanks, in large part, to consulting bills.
An audit in that case found “unusually high” consultant fees, while the cost of actual construction accounted for less than half of the budget. As a result of spending gone awry, LA’s plan to tackle homelessness has been considerably slowed, and many who were promised housing are still waiting.
Consultants’ parasitic grip on government spending can have disastrous consequences. A covid app and a subway tunnel are one thing. A roof over one’s head is entirely another.
Gov. Hochul was right to put the Excelsior Pass money pit out of its misery. But the state was wrong to unleash this dystopian app in the first place — and wronger still for allowing it to balloon unchecked.
If New York wants to stop hemorrhaging residents in droves, it better demonstrate a greater deal of respect for the hard-earned tax dollars it extracts from its citizens.
