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Posted on 10/22/2013 10:43:31 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The White House has tabbed former acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jeff Zients to work with the team overseeing repairs to the ObamaCare website.
Zients, who served as the White House Chief Performance Officer, was named in September as the director of the National Economic Council. According to the administration, he will transition into that role at the end of this year.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Zients started on Monday to provide “short-term advice, assessments and recommendations” in a blog post obtained earlier on Tuesday by Bloomberg.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said Zients was tabbed because he was "an expert in the field of effective management."
Carney said HHS would be "tapping his experience and expertise as they address the challenges which have come up with the administration of the website."
The White House press secretary was asked if bringing in Zients was an attempt to sideline Sebelius, but Carney sidestepped the question, saying simply that the former acting OMB director would be "working alongside HHS's team."
Carney described Zients's role as a "short-term assignment" and that he would be providing "advice, assessments and recommendations."
Zients joined the administration in 2009 as the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget. A private equity and corporate management specialist, Zients twice served as acting budget director and led an effort to reorganize federal agencies to eliminate inefficiencies.
In his role as Chief Performance Officer, Zients lead an "Accountable Government Initiative" designed to reform how the government purchased and maintained its information technology services. Under his direction, the administration in 2010 temporarily halted $3 billion in technology projects in an attempt to reduce costs and improve technology functionality.
Later that year, Zients told the Northern Virginia Technology Council that government IT management "needs to be more agile, more adaptable to new technologies, more accountable and more focused on results."
Too often, IT projects are over budget, behind schedule and fail to deliver results,” he added, according to FCW. “Fixing IT is central to everything we are trying to do. IT is our top priority.”
“Jeff has a sterling reputation as a business leader, and he earned the admiration and respect of everyone he worked with during his four years in leadership positions at the Office of Management and Budget,” President Obama said in a statement in September.
On Monday, the president admitted the ObamaCare website "hasn't worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work."
Obama said the administration was undertaking a "tech surge" to fix the problems that have plagued the site since its launch at the beginning of the month.
"We’ve got people working overtime, 24/7, to boost capacity and address the problems," Obama said. "Experts from some of America’s top private-sector tech companies who, by the way, have seen things like this happen before, they want it to work. They're reaching out. They're offering to send help. We’ve had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team."
They're cashing in...
I have nephew who develops software for material handling. If he turned out a product equivalent to this fiasco he would be out of business in a heart-beat.
Why doesn’t he just appoint whoever was in charge of the IRS attack on the Tea Party? Or the Bengazi cover up?
Zients worked for ROMNEY?
Oh, I feel so much better now that an OMB guy is now going to fix Healthcare.gov!!
The budget and spending have been managed so well that he’ll have this problem licked in no time!
Issa investigating OMB over ObamaCare site "Republican members of the House Oversight Committee on Monday sent a letter to two Obama administration officials demanding information on a feature of the ObamaCare online healthcare portal they say was implemented to “mask the sticker shock” of insurance premiums, and which they say is to blame for the website’s poor performance.
In a letter to two top technology officers at the Office of Management and Budget, Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) accused the administration of making the “political decision” to hide the costs of insurance premiums online, which he says contributed to the botched website development......"
Maybe, but I don’t think Bain has been all Romney all the time.
“Zients had also served on the boards of Revolution Health Group”
Revolution Health Group is a United States-based corporation founded in July 2005 by Steve Case, who previously co-founded America Online. Revolution Health’s stated mission is to change healthcare by giving people the tools, information and support to manage their health and wellness actively.
The company portal launched on January 20, 2007, using Ruby on Rails technology.
On October 25, 2007, the company dismissed 60 employees, or a quarter of its work-force, ostensibly as part of a restructuring.
On May 23, 2008, RHG terminated its employer business unit and business to business unit as well as laying off an additional 50 people.
Don’t let facts get in the way of painting your political opponents with their own brush!
She blinded me with Zients.
Wonder how long the temporary halt lasted while the attempt was made?
Sounds like it bombed, given the lack of detail. Which projects and what were the results?
One thing that we FReepers can be be comfortable with is that there is no, none, zero, zilch, nada cronyism in this White Hut.
MIB is bringing some of the sharpest aliens on the planet to take care of this mess.
I predict within 6 months the site will be re-built, almost from scratch, and it will be nearly fully-functional (or, close enough to lie about with a straight face). The unions will be given whatever they want in order to assure their arm-twisting will be out in full force for next year’s election. This battle is by no means done yet
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