In case any of you ever wanted a primer in how messed up our Government contracting system can be--and how walled off it actually is from the Government officials who get blamed for its failures, here are some key points re: the misinformation that is being spread everywhere it seems. (This status references the bi-partisan MORNING JOE teams conversation regarding the Obamacare website debacle this morning, but could apply to anything youre hearing these days): -- First and foremost, they are all agreed that its unacceptable that the site isnt working when any 12 year old could have built this web site. Really? Having just personally supervised the build of a web site on 3 servers with multiple databases and Government-level encryption and security requirements--we were brought in after 3 contractors before us, including one of the biggest names in consulting--had failed, the Obamacare site (which has, at least 30 separate databases) nowhere near the kind of static HTML, PHP, or WordPress sites that any 12 year old can build. I had a team of 10, working with an additional BoozAllenHamilton team of experts and trust me, when youre trying to deal with as many variables and security requirements as a Government site, and the site didnt go smoothly by any means, for reasons that were completely unpredictable. -- Second, Joe claims (unchallenged) that the reason the Web team couldnt have been fired was because they were protected union laws. Uhm, contractors are NOT federal employees who are protected by union laws. And this wasnt just one contractor, but a consortium of approximately 50 contractors, including SAIC and BoozAllenHamilton, handing each part. While several folks do deserve to be fired over this (but maybe not the ones you think). The reason many contractors arent replaced (fired) has more to do with the system: it can take six weeks to a year or more to identify, select, and install a new contractor on a major contract. This is because of acquisition laws and regulations that Congress would have to change if you want serious overhaul. To have fired or replaced any contractor on this team would have jeopardized the rollout of the web site (not the program, just the web site) by months to a year because of a system thats broken but that the President himself cant override, due to federal laws preventing (for good reasons) Government officials from affecting the Contracting process--yes, they could have been fired for non-performance, but with a hard deadline, there was no room to maneuver. -- Third, they are talking about how the President and HHS went to a Canada and selected a Canadian company to do the job. Huh? Did you guys know that, thanks to NAFTA, Canadian companies are on equal footing with American ones for major contracts--and we can compete equally with Canadian companies for most of THEIR contracts as well--so there was no going to Canada. And laws are in place to prevent Government officials (from the lowest to the highest) from influencing the selection for a reason: to prevent corruption. This means that the Administration could only set the requirements (and there do appear to have been delays and problems doing that by the officials managing the contract) and then could have NOTHING to do with who was selected. This is actually what we want: Government officials prevented from being involved in competitive selections. But it also means that you cant blame a specific politician or agency head for selecting one company over another. You can blame the agency acquisition team for that selection--and probably should, since this Canadian company did indeed get fired by another Government for failing to deliver,--but you cant blame the officials, who are bound by law to accept the impartial acquisition teams selection, with very few exceptions. And did I mention this contract had more than 50 contractors (including American behemoth contractors BoozAllenHamilton and SAIC) on it? It was hardly a singular failure by a single contractor. -- There are a lot of things broken in the largely Congressionally-mandated Contracting system, part of which create all kinds of barriers to identifying and mitigating problems--not the least of which is the 50 contractors, most of whom are forbidden to task each other (only primes can task subs, if they are simply on the same team, no tasking is allowed) and thus must work through Government leads to convince them of the need for the other team (who they may or may not have direct contact with) to do the task needed for them to complete their job. This is highly inefficient, and since most contractors are covering their butts, there is often resistance or an appeal to the tasking Government lead as to why they shouldnt HAVE to do the job. -- And they keep talking about cost-overruns and going over budget. Thats b.s. While Im sure that there is some overrun here, it is not the same as the budget being changed to accommodate changes in requirements. When the site was scoped, it was set up for 8-10 state exchanges. Then it became en vogue for Republican governors to refuse to set up state exchanges and have the Federal Government do it. Suddenly, the Obamacare site had to host the information and separate databases and sign-up protocols for TWENTY SIX (26) states--nearly 3x the original requirements! When the deadline was hard (had to be Oct 1st to give people six months to sign up) that means you have to add 3x (or more) people and budget to get the job done in time (each State has different plans, regulations, etc. with these governors doing nothing to assist the Federal Governmetn in the set-up, for political reasons), and thats just the changes in requirements for state exchanges. If you sell cupcakes and your client says our demand has now tripled, so we need to triple our order, but still need them by next week (so you triple your staff at last minute prices, rent more kitchens at last minute prices, and have to buy 3x more materials at last minute prices), adjusting the cost of their order accordingly, you cannot be accused of going over budget when you turn in your invoice. If you had turned in the original deliverable for the higher price, that would be criminal, but if if the project scopes up, the contract is modded, and the budget is adjusted accordingly, then it is not an unacceptable overrun by the contractor(s). Because Republican governors--rightly or wrongly--decided en masse to not set up their state exchanges and have the Federal Government do it for them (without any additional time to do all this extra work), it increased the requirement and the cost--and anytime you have an inflexible deadline, the only way you an get a job done is to throw more money at it. Would it be worthy to argue the deadline shouldnt have been inflexible? Absolutely, but again, was Congress going to rewrite the law to allow the deadlines for enrollment to shift? Probably not, since they were busy rocketing to shutdown at the time.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 10:50:07 +0000
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