Obamacare Website Problems Go Deeper Than Federal Contracting Practices
COMMENTARY | The Obamacare signup website disaster is causing more needed scrutiny at how the federal government acquires IT services, according to Politico. However the problem goes deeper than just bureaucratic government contracting politics.
It has been practically a clichÃ?© that government contracts often go not to the best but to the best connected, especially if the latter is well versed in the art of navigating the government’s byzantine regulations. This was apparently the case when the contract to build the Obamacare signup site went to a company that was known for botching similar projects.
Reforming the system that led to the Obamacare meltdown will likely take some time. Meanwhile, Politico has also unearthed emails that suggest that White House and Health and Human Services officials knew in advance that the website was going to be a disaster. The main concern seemed to be about how would the government spin the public once the disaster became apparent.
In the private sector, when an IT project is somehow not ready by an appointed deadline, the deadline is pushed back until it is ready. If the mess is really bad, a new team of contractors is brought in to fix it. But the Obama people apparently did not consider this option. The bad publicity, it was thought, made that option unacceptable.
Of course in retrospect the administration might well wish they had settled for the public relations fallout for delaying the website and thus the full implementation of Obamacare instead of what it is getting now.
Federal IT contracting and, indeed, contracting in general needs reforming. But more importantly the culture in the Obama administration that was in denial at the depths of the disaster it was facing needs fixing as well. If Obama was smart, he would not only start replacing people but also start reorganizing his government. For a start a culture that allows bad news to filter to the top quick enough so that it could be dealt with would be a vast improvement over what is now the case.
