The healthcare.gov site is "only the latest episode in a string of information technology debacles by the federal government," wrote Clay Johnson and Harper Reed, two programmers with political pasts (Johnson was Howard Dean's lead programmer in 2004; Reed was the brain behind Obama's 2012 digital campaign) in a Times op-ed.
The pair went on: This latest failure is frustrating for us to watch ... We must find a fix to the federal procurement process that spares the government’s technology projects from the self-inflicted wounds of signing big contracts whose terms repeatedly and spectacularly go unmet.
The White House has promised that a "tech surge" of the "best and the brightest," including from Silicon Valley, has been brought in to repair the health-care site. But nobody knows, or is telling anyone, who those people actually are.
Contractors grilled at a congressional hearing this week wouldn't name names, and several tech executives questioned yesterday said they had no inside information on the makeup of the government's emergency coder team.
Verizon has reportedly been tapped to help with the revamp, but the extent of its involvement isn't known. Former budget official Jeffrey Zients is overseeing the rescue, but since he's not a known coder, his role is limited to managing the project.
--SNIP--
(In a conference call, Zients predicted that the site would "work smoothly" by the end of November.) But the episode has confirmed the suspicions of many in Silicon Valley that the government's infrastructure, even on key projects, relies too heavily on outdated legacy systems and could be run more efficiently by those inside their own camp.
SolyndraCare
What could possibly go wrong?
No...Obama blame others???? , You know I read this here before: