"Healthcare.gov" web developer CGI has a long & storied checkered past

Rules of combat #8 -- always remember your weapon was made by the lowest bidder....

 

Bloomberg Weekly has a great piece about this and NPR's Diane Rehms Show had a great installment this week.

The coding is terrible for the site. But that is half the issue.

A badly coded site should site be operational. The other part of the challenge is that the site has to communicate and integrate with hundreds of other sites that are programmed differently.

Of course since the government was in charge of handling this the job was guaranteed to be bungled. We lack leadership in Washington, we lack competency in Washington, we lack focus. The website is a mess and will have to be systematically rewritten. But it won't get better soon. Just wait til the teenage hackers start in on it...get ready for a mess. The wisdom of our founders will be realized, the federal government is, at best, a necessary evil.

 

Which is why they intended it to be as small as possible.

 

Bingo. What I can't believe is the cost. What was it? $560 million? Seriously?

 

Its collusion probably. Designing this kind of site would cost a substantial amount of money, and tens of millions of dollars. It is a site that the whole world will use (or at least look at.) I can't imagine that number is accurate, if it is, we need to remove everyone in Washington and start over with new leaders.

Edited to add: I looked it up and see the costs haven't been completely lined out by the GAO. I'd suspect the contract for the firm that developed the site would be about $100 million over three years. That makes sense. The $560 million sounds like a FoxNews number and probably isn't accurate. The total cost, at least what the GAO is reporting, is likely closer to $300 million but that probably also includes server usage and data center creation. I can see that this project, over 5 years would cost that much. IMHO, it is still too much but the government isn't trying to be efficient with this, they're trying to push it through. That always costs more.