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This might come as a shock; you had better sit down. An internal review released on Friday revealed that the federal government did not properly vet the contactors it hired to develop the web portal that would service customers shopping on the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchange. Of course, disastrous debut of HealthCare.gov led every rational person to reach this same conclusion months ago, but it’s now official. “One of the reports showed that CGI Federal, a key contractor in the development of the site, had ties to failed projects, while an earlier story revealed that the company...

Seven months after federal officials fired CGI Federal for its botched work on Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, the IRS awarded the same company a $4.5 million IT contract for its new Obamacare tax program. CGI is a $10.5 billion Montreal-based company that has forever been etched into the public’s mind as the company behind the bungled Obamacare main website. After facing a year of embarrassing failures, federal officials finally pulled the plug on the company and terminated CGI’s contract in January 2014. Yet on Aug. 11, seven months later, IRS officials signed a new contract with CGI to provide “critical functions”...

Seven months after federal officials fired CGI Federal for its botched work on Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, the IRS awarded the same company a $4.5 million IT contract for its new Obamacare tax program. CGI is a $10.5 billion Montreal-based company that has forever been etched into the public’s mind as the company behind the bungled Obamacare main website. After facing a year of embarrassing failures, federal officials finally pulled the plug on the company and terminated CGI’s contract in January 2014. Yet on Aug. 11, seven months later, IRS officials signed a new contract with CGI to provide “critical functions”...

Many are already familiar with Obamacare’s front-page debut and subsequent debacle called Healthcare.gov. Its crashes, bugs, and general incompleteness are infamous and have been the butt of many jokes, excuses from administration officials, and complaints from consumers attempting to use it. With not many signs of improvement for the website, many have looked for a scapegoat to place blame. One possible scapegoat has been a Canadian company, CGI Group, who was awarded a $93.7 million contract to develop Healthcare.gov, but that hasn’t discouraged the state of Texas from continuing and expanding its existing relationship with CGI. In August of this...

The White House had to defend its rollout of the President's signature health care legislation Saturday after two scathing reports that allege missteps, miscommunication and lack of leadership sank the launch of Obamacare's online exchanges. The New York Times and the Washington Post each reported on a meeting between contractor CGI Federal and government employees at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in late August. CGI won the main contract to build the Obamacare website, and CMS, the branch of the Department of Health and Human Services that was overseeing the launch, was growing worried the site was riddled...

The day before the catastrophic Healthcare.gov was supposed to start offering insurance, internal reports show that the website was only configured to handle “1,100 users” at a single time before “response time gets too high.” The document was released by oversight.house.gov. Under the category “stress test,” testers for Healthcare.gov ran a performance evaluation on the site. This evaluation occurred on September 30, just one day before the site was ready to hit prime-time. During the testing, results were, quite frankly, atrocious. The tester writes (emphasis mine): Ran performance testing overnight in IMP1B environment. Working with CGI to tune the FFM...

There is widespread fury at the lies which were used to sell ObamaCare, a more than 2,000-page piece of legislation no one read before it was passed, a law opposed by the majority of voters which was crammed down our throats without a single Republican vote. The law essentially was a mishmash blank slate which left it to the administration's HHS head, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to write as she pleased and the president to -- by Executive order -- pay off with exemptions and special treatment those cronies and rent seekers not already paid off in the legislative and regulatory...

An internal government memo, obtained by CNN today and written just days before the Obamacare website opened, warned of a "high" security risk because of a lack of testing of the website. "Due to system readiness issues, the (security control assessment) was only partly completed," said the memo from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "This constitutes a risk that must be accepted and mitigated to support the Marketplace Day 1 operations."

CBS News has learned the website failed with a small test pool of 200 to 300 people that included employees from the government and insurance companies. CMS employees were provided fake personal information to enter into HealthCare.gov rather than their own data and were given a date that testing would begin. However, on that date, the employees were told it was being postponed. When the testing finally took place in late September, the testers started trying to create an application. Just a couple of pages into the process, everything "ground to a stop," said one source. "It froze. It couldn't...

<p>Health Fail: Healthcare.gov's implosion may be due to one of its major developers being selected less for its technical competence than for cronyism. Perhaps the White House was hoping for a friends and family discount.</p> <p>Why pick a Canadian firm with a French name to help develop the official ObamaCare website? It certainly wasn't based on the track record in developing health care software of CGI Federal, the IT contractor that orchestrated most of the Healthcare.gov website.</p>

The Obama administration was given stark warnings just one month before that the federal healthcare site was not ready to go live, according to a confidential report obtained by CNN. The caution, from the main contractor CGI, warned of a number of open risks and issues for the HealthCare.gov web site even as company executives were testifying publicly that the project had achieved key milestones. The CGI document, which describes "outstanding issues currently being mitigated" says the testing timeframes are "not adequate to complete full functional, system, and integration testing activities" and lists the impact of the problems as "significant."...

If you wanted to build a case study in the perfect recipe for IT project disaster, you wouldn't have to look any further than the new official Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov. The site, which was supposed to be the official gateway for Americans to purchase cheap (now clearly up for debate) health insurance, has become an overnight poster child for just how bad the government can fumble a well-to-do technology implementation. The common symptoms are all present: budget overruns, too little time to test, poor design & planning, and you can take it from there. So when the President came out...

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. --John Gall

Michelle Obama and CGI Federal executive belonged to student group at Princeton that hosted pro-terrorist speaker First Lady Michelle Obama and her Princeton classmate whose company received the no-bid government contract to build the HealthCare.gov Obamacare website were both members of a black student organization that caused a tense scene on campus by inviting a PLO leader who advocated for terrorism. Michelle Obama ’85 and her classmate Toni Townes-Whitley ’85, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, were both students at the university when their groups the Organization of Black Unity (OBU) and the Third World Center (TWC) engaged in...

Michelle Obama’s relationship with Princeton classmate Toni McCall Townes-Whitley, whose company earned the no-bid contract to design the disastrous Healthcare.Gov Obamacare website, continued after the Obamas moved into the White House. Townes-Whitley and her husband even enjoyed “Christmas with the Obamas” at the White House in December 2010, according to a Facebook album created by Townes-Whitley. Although neither Michelle Obama nor Townes-Whitley has discussed their relationship, the Christmas event took place just seven months after Townes-Whitley joined CGI Federal as a senior vice president. Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, leads CGI Federal’s Civilian Agency Programs (CAP) Business Unit, which earned...

In mid-October The Washington Examiner reported that Federal Officials only considered one firm to build the epic fail now known as healthcare.gov. When that story broke you had to suspect that someone probably had a kickback coming. Richard Pollock reported on October 13th: Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut. Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI...

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website. Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company. Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas-princeton-classmate-is-executive-at-company-that-built-obamacare-website/#ixzz2inpT7B3q

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the no-bid contract to build the failed Obamacare website. Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company. Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration's showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors. As questions mount over the website's failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government...

A surge in government spending in the six months before the ObamaCare exchanges went live pushed federal spending to top government contractors over the $1 billion mark, a new study finds. According to the report released Thursday by Bloomberg Government analyst Peter Gosselin, federal spending ramped up in the months leading up to Oct. 1, with $352 million of the $1 billion in federal contracts to the top 10 ObamaCare contractors awarded during this time. “In a typical IT project, spending ramps up to a peak, then trails off during the final phase,” Gosselin wrote. The price tag usually associated...