I am shocked, shocked! to learn that political cronyism was involved in the development of the Healthcare.gov web site:
The biggest problem with Healthcare.gov seems simple enough: It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT.
That’s one of the insights that can be gleaned from the work done by the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that focuses on government transparency. In a report filed this past week, the group examined why the system broke as horribly as it did: The contracts awarded to those who built it were, by and large, existing government contractors with “deep political pockets.”
Has no one ever heard of a qualified bidders list? I’ve never heard of a federal project of any sort by any administration that didn’t limit the bidders to those on an already-restricted list of qualified bidders.
Here’s how it works, kiddies. The lowest bidder from the list of qualified vendors is selected. Not the most competent or even the lowest bidder. The lowest qualified bidder. So, for example, Booz Allen was practically guaranteed to be involved. You remember Booz Allen? They’re the guys who hired Edward Snowden and who knows how many other dubiously qualified and certainly insecure folks that they farmed out to the federal government for beaucoups bucks. How Booz Allen continues to be an approved vendor is a puzzlement.
How to you get to be an approved vendor? Connections. How do you get connections? Lobbyists help. How do you get lobbyists? Money. The return on investment on hiring lobbyists is fantastic. A half billion dollars is one heckuva software development project.
Read and weep at the article linked above on the connections of the various companies involved in this particular development. If your project is going to be built by the federal government, that’s how it will inevitably be built.
I am sure you know, but for those in the dark, the specification is usually tailored for a specific company. The company is chosen. The bid specification is written. Bids are submitted, and the contract is awarded. These contracts usually contain a clause(s) to increase the cost.
As one commentor has noted, it is politics over policy. The rich have rigged the system, and then, they complain about the inequality of the system. Not to worry, they are there to help.
Where I come from that’s known as a “directed bid”. They’re very common both in the public and private sectors. Just about every federal, state, or local government contract I ever got was a directed bid.
How to you get to be an approved vendor? Connections. How do you get connections? Lobbyists help. How do you get lobbyists? Money. The return on investment on hiring lobbyists is fantastic. A half billion dollars is one heckuva software development project.
Lobbyists? How could that be? I thought the Obama creed was to have an open, transparent, less polarized government, free from greedy pests called Lobbyists! Oh yes, I forgot, those were his fighting, pre-election words, that swirled down the drain once this president achieved his goal of ‘winning.’
There are even more fighting words — of the bombastic kind — generated by Obama and the dems to beat down their republican opponents, rather than honestly solve the problems at hand. Again, it’s all about winning during the next election cycle, rather than accomplishing anything significant or worthy for public consumption
BTW, there is further analysis today speculating what is causing profound glitches in the government healthcare site. People are now saying that the fact interested parties have to create personal accounts first, before browsing healthcare options, is a design flaw overloading the system. However, HHS seems to have deliberately wanted this sequence, as they feared once people saw the prices and details of the plans offered, prior to any subsidy authorizations, they would automatically be turned off from participating in this HC program. Once again, disingenuous marketing and political subterfuge rules the day, as the dems weave and bob around legislative impasse in order to deflect any and all blame onto others.
The party of weasels — Harry Reid and the dems!
Yes, no surprises here, this is SOP.
Now, expand costs to well over $300 billion (and growing) and you have the F-35 program.
@jan
This is not a D / R issue. It is a bureaucratic issue. In many large companies, it is the same. Once you get on the prefered vendor list, you can bid on projects, but until then, your company needs to “partner up” with a prefered vendor.
In regulated industries, it is a similar. You need to fill out the proper paperwork, and you need to word it properly. There are also ways to stop/deter a regulator, but you need to know how the process works.
I have little patience for people who work in a regulated industry but know little about how it works. Anybody whining about the meanie regulators should learn a little more about the system.
Yeah, it’s amazing that more people don’t recognize that one of the main purposes of regulation is to prevent upstart competition from new entrants.
And so we vote for, and support larger government…………..why?