Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website? 786
MarkWhittington writes "Glenn Reynolds, the purveyor of Instapundit, asked the pertinent question, 'If big government can put a man on the moon, why can't it put up a simple website without messing it up?' The answer, as it turns out, is a rather simple one. The Apollo program, that President John F. Kennedy mandated to put a man on the moon and return him to the Earth, was a simple idea well carried out for a number of reasons. The primary one was that Congress did not pass a 1,800 or so page bill backed up by a mind-numbing amount of regulations mandating how NASA would do it. The question of how to conduct the lunar voyages was left up to the engineers at NASA and the aerospace industry at the time. The government simply provided the resources necessary to do the job and a certain degree of oversight. Imagine if President Obama had stated, 'I believe the nation should commit itself to the goal of enabling all Americans to access affordable health insurance' but then left the how to do it to some of the best experts in health care and economics without partisan interference."
Comment removed (Score:1, Informative)
Apollo 1? Apollo 13? (Score:5, Informative)
Our efforts to land on the moon didn't go smoothly. Also we spent a lot more money to go to the moon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13 [wikipedia.org]
Complex problems are complex.
Re:The answer is SIMPLE (Score:5, Informative)
It's not the lawyers, it's the developers.
Re: What ? (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, just ask the UK how the NHS upgrade went, 16 Billion spent and then pulled the plug.
Re:No-Bid contract to cronies perhaps? (Score:4, Informative)
and how did apollo work?
the big aerospace companies created a common company they owned together to do the work and divvied up the sub contracts amongst each other along with the profits
$136 Billion in Today's Dollars (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_project_Apollo [wikipedia.org]
My back of the envelope calculation puts 4% of the US's 2013 budget expenditures at $150 billion. So an equivalent enterprise by the United States government would be roughly half a trillion dollars.
The failure of healthcare.gov to work properly shows what everyone here on Slashdot already knows: project planning is difficult.
Gov. Purchasing is the Real Problem (Score:5, Informative)
As a federal worker I can tell you that trying to buy something for government use is an extremely byzantine process. An example, if I need to buy a monitor cable, I have to fill out 3 forms (one of them is 14 pages), get four _independent_ approvals, quotes (yes... quotes for a monitor cable), and then follow the documents to make sure nothing gets messed-up along the way. I have to do this for _any_ piece of equipment that is in any way related to information technology. I don't want to describe the process for anything requiring a contract and I can't imagine the amount of work that went into writing the requirements document for a project involving 55 (55!) contracting agencies. The REAL PROBLEM here is the desperate need for contract and purchasing reform in the federal government.
Re:No-Bid contract to cronies perhaps? (Score:5, Informative)
$700M? $800M? A Beeellion dollars? This mis-attributed number seems to keep going up and up.
$634 million is the sum of all contracts let to CGI over seven years, not the amount expended on the web site.
Re:What ? (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody said that. Pelosi said we have to pass the bill "so *you* can see what's in it." The normal quote is made to show that Congress didn't know what was in it; but Pelosi was addressing the constituency and trying to imply that they don't know what a bill is about until the changes start happening in real life--that we don't know how the bill will affect us until it's passed, and so all the media hooplah is just noise we shouldn't concern ourselves with.
Still an idiotic statement.
Re:The answer is SIMPLE (Score:5, Informative)
Lest you forget, Obamacare is a Democrat invention. Lock, Stock, and Barrel. They wrote it, they passed it, they implemented it.
Re:What ? (Score:3, Informative)
But doesn't this just show that there are very many people against the bill as passed?
(And before I'm modded down for stating a personal opinion, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have healthcare reform. Quite the contrary. I'm saying that many people like me believe the ACA did little to help. And because the political atmosphere at the time was ignored, now the partisanship has been ignited like never before and we have little chance for real, good change to occur.)
Re:What ? (Score:5, Informative)
When Toyota says that they chose Canada over the US because of health care reasons, I'm heavily inclined to believe them. After all, with its larger population, surely the US has a higher number of highly skilled technicians to work for Toyota. But instead, they chose to add another plant to Canada. I'll leave you to reconcile the facts with your rhetoric.
Re:The reason is private insurance (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What ? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it wouldn't:
1. Those involved in the negotiations have stated that the Obama administration got the plan it wanted.
2. My congressman at the time, Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), threatened to vote against Obamacare unless there was the option to choose the US Government as your health insurance provider. Obama took him on Air Force One and personally lobbied him about it: I have no idea what happened on that plane, but I do know that Kucinich changed his vote as a result of that ride.
3. Look at the plan that Hillary Clinton put together back in 1993: It also included private insurance companies as a key part of the system.
4. There were some Democrats who supported single payer systems. They were basically laughed out of the room in presidential primaries, congressional committees, etc.
Re:What ? (Score:4, Informative)
ACA was passed by Democrats without a single vote from the Republicans which has politically doomed it from the start. Other large government programs were passed with significant bi-partisan majorities, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The ACA was passed without any Republican support and with lots of back room deals as well as the famous use of "reconciliation" to get it passed in the Senate after Massachusetts voted in someone to the Senate who opposed it and upset the filibuster proof majority.
In that light, why would you be surprised that there was a lot of political fallout?
Other large government programs were passed with bipartisan majorities, yes, but that was back when we had two functioning political parties that both had an interest in governing effectively. The GOP is now a reactionary, neo-confederate interest, seeking to monkey-wrench the government and hasten its failure. Why should the rest of us be hostage to their insane whims? The ACA isn't a great bill, but it was the only game in town, and it is marginally better than what we had. There are plenty of better systems we can point to, but critically, our "loyal opposition" didn't point to any of them during the debate, instead choosing to howl incessantly about non-existent death panels. Instead of "leading" when the, as they continually jabber, the President "failed to lead" they merely put out talking points about leadership failures in others while failing to recognize the blemish on their own face.
And here we are.
It would be a stronger argument you were making if any Republican had shown any interest in governing during the debate of this law, but the only thing even remotely approaching genuine participation turned out to be strategic stonewalling by "moderates" who were so terrified of being "primaried" they simply backed away from talks with the Democrats. So the bill is 100% Democrats-written. Whose fault is that? The GOP offered no workable solution of any kind that I know of. We heard platitudes about "free market solutions," but when you try to nail down what that means there was no coherent plan that could be sussed out of the responses.
Not that easy to blame the contractors (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What ? (Score:4, Informative)
There was a political atmosphere against the ACA,
to clarify my remarks, the "opposition to the ACA" predated the existence of the ACA, or, indeed, the decision to pursue health care reform. The GOP held a meeting a day after the inauguration, before any of this was decided, and announced afterward their goals of "making this a one-term presidency" and "breaking" Obama.
I do see that I omitted the part about "predating the ACA"--my point was the opposition was ginned up with an eye on attacking whatever Obama brought to the table--it was built around the ACA once the ACA existed, but they would have attacked anything he presented just as vociferously.
An open, transparent, bipartisan process ... (Score:5, Informative)
The "political atmosphere" at the time was created for the purpose of blocking this reform. It didn't "pre-date" the reform effort. The propaganda efforts kicked into high gear to "break" this Presidency--to undo the public's will by neutering a popular President so as to limit his ability to do the people's work. They started screaming he was a communist because a bill modeled largely on their own response to Hilarycare in the 90's had been proposed by a Democratic congress and administration
That is a bit revisionist. The reality was that candidate Obama promised an open, transparent, bipartisan process while he was campaigning. Once in office President Obama turned over health care reform to the Democratic party leadership who promptly went into the back room with their lobbyists and began drafting health care reform legislation in a very partisan fashion. In those first couple of week of the new administration the Democratic attitude was that they control the White House, the House of Representatives and and the Senate - so f' the Republicans we'll do whatever we want. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel literally said this in public in this first week or two. Completely contrary to Obama's promises on the campaign trail. This poisoned the well of bipartisanship. Tossed away the opportunity to get moderate Republicans involved in the drafting. Even in the hyper partisan atmosphere that followed there were a couple of Republicans who were peeled off at times. This indicates some would have probably come on board is there were seats at the table.
If we had the open, transparent, and bipartisan (seats at the table for Republicans) process promised then things would have gone quite different. The Democratic leadership and the White House are equally responsible with the Republican leadership for the current hyper partisan atmosphere. The Democrats locked the Republicans out, the Republicans respond by becoming obstructionists. Bipartisanship was not given a chance by the Democrats. Again, this was all in the first week or two.
It is mind boggling that President Obama, who knew health care would be his signature issue and his legacy, would give up leadership to his partisan party leaders, remain largely silent as they took the process into the back rooms, and merely became a salesman for whatever they came up with. He should have used his bully pulpit to pressure his party to stick to his campaign promises for an open, transparent and bipartisan process. His silence, and Rahm Emanuel's comments, suggested he was OK with the business as usual process his party leadership took. Again, this was all in the first week or two, the Republican obstructionism that you refer to came after this.
BTW, I am an independent disgusted by both parties.
Re:The answer is SIMPLE (Score:2, Informative)
Nice diversion, but irrelevant. Dems own it.
Re:What ? (Score:2, Informative)
This just ignores the large public outcry against this law. It certainly true that there is a large movement in support of this law. However the people who are against this law do not constitute a small cadre of anti-government extremest. A majority of the House, all of whom were elected after the ACA passed and many who ran specifically on the mandate to gut the law indicate that the opposition to this law consists of a large number of citizens. One should not forget that during the time before the law was passed Massachusetts, hardly a bastion of Conservative anti-government citizenry, elected a Republican to replace on of the most liberal members of congress specifically on the platform to stop the ACA from becoming law. Only a shady, probably unconstitutional, procedural move allowed the passed senate law to go to the House for a vote to make the ACA law. Proper procedure would have been for the house to pass its own bill and then for both bills to have gone to committee, and then sent back to both houses for a vote once a single version was agreed upon. This was not done because both Pelosi and Reed knew that it would never pass.
During the run up to the vote Democratic members of congress actually stopped having town hall meetings with their own constituents because the opposition to the law was filled with so much vitriol. Barring specific minor parts of this law (pre-existing conditions and extended coverage of adult children) and except in the most liberal circles, this law is vastly unpopular. Were it put to a plebiscite it would easily be defeated.
Re:The answer is SIMPLE (Score:3, Informative)
"I would have expected careful selection of contractors, and contractors placed on notice that Hell Hath No Fury like the customer if they fuck this one up."
It turns out that the Senior VP of CGI is an old acquaintance of Michelle Obama. An ex- college classmate in fact.
Coincidence? I think not.
Re:An open, transparent, bipartisan process ... (Score:5, Informative)
If we had the open, transparent, and bipartisan (seats at the table for Republicans) process promised then things would have gone quite different.
Now who's being revisionist? We tried that: Every time the GOP was invited to participate they howled about death panels. Every time they were asked for an alternate plan they babbled incoherently about a "Free market system" without illuminating us as to how to implement such a thing in real life. I'm not sure how many opportunities they should have been extended.
It's easy to say they "should have been included," and, indeed, they should have been, but their non-involvement comes from their own choices, though. In effect they essentially eliminated themselves from the serious conversation by saying such radical and easily disproven nonsense, and are now whining about not being included even though they excluded themselves from the proceedings.
I count at least three, maybe four (depending on semantics) major pushes to get GOP support for this law. Two of them were the "Olympia Snowe-job" and the "Grassley Gambit," wherein the named senators entered (in bad faith) into talks about writing a healthcare reform law for the purpose of dragging out the proceedings even-longer-than-they'd-already-gone-on because they knew full-well they 1) Weren't going to vote for anything Obama supported and 2) They also knew the democrats were desperate to get even one Republican to sign-on and take part, and the democrats (somehow, despite being slapped in the face with evidence daily for months) still hadn't figured out that the GOP had no intention of "governing" by reforming healthcare, but every intention of "stymieing" Obama, whatever idea he brought to the table.
There was also the summit, where the GOP basically said "free-market, rah rah!" but didn't offer any plan. Hey, a free market is a lovely idea: How about some concrete suggestions on having it 1) Actually exist int he real world (i.e. "How to get there from here,") without 2) Taking us through a radical "shakeout" period where "the market" decides the best answer to the question "How much does life-saving treatment cost?" is "How much you got?" and 3) Do both #1 and #2 without locking out millions of poor people from access to care.
And, of course, the main evidence that suggests the GOP would have adamantly, vehemently opposed anything the President proposed is their own words, the day after the inauguration. They'd already decided on this course before there was an ACA--they already decided they would lock-step oppose anything the Obama administration tried to accomplish--short of him changing over to the GOP mid-term, anyway.