CGI Federal

The lead contractor on the dysfunctional Web site for the Affordable Care Act is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects, including a flawed effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers, documents and interviews show.

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Over the last few days, I have spoken in some detail about the state of the federal Obamacare exchanges with several officials of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (the HHS agency that is running the exchanges), and with a number of reasonably well placed insurance company officials in Washington... Read More »

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not believe CGI Federal, its former Healthcare.gov contractor, could complete its work on the site in time, and thus selected Accenture as the new contractor with a no-bid $90 million-plus contract, according to documents. Read More »

Sometime in the coming months, the Defense Department will bid out its Healthcare Management Systems Modernization contract, an effort so large in monetary size and game-changing scope that it could significantly influence the future of health care in the United States.

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The main contractors for Healthcare.gov were interrogated, scruntinzed, and criticized Thursday by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, days after the Obama Administration called in a “fix it” team amid growing public frustration with the site’s problems. Read More »

As the problem-plagued roll-out of President Obama’s signature healthcare policy undergoes congressional scrutiny for the first time, we speak with Clay Johnson, a former Obama campaign innovation expert who founded Blue State Digital, the company that built Obama’s 2008 website. During a House panel on Thursday, lawmakers questioned executives of two of the lead contractors behind the website, healthcare.gov — CGI Federal and Quality Software Systems Incorporated — about the myriad of glitches and defects. Johnson says the new website is built with outdated and proprietary software. "When the government is building software like this, it ought to be built out in the open — built with a licensing system called open source so that the public truly owns it," Johnson says. He notes that "In 1996, Congress lobotomized itself by getting rid of its technology think tank called the Technology Assessment Office. So they’re writing bills where they don’t understand the technology required in their laws."

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In terminating CGI Federal's role in HealthCare.gov, President Obama finally "fired" one of the parties responsible for Obamacare's faulty website. That may appease the chorus of those calling on Obama to hold someone "accountable," but it does nothing to fix the underlying problem: the system for selecting contractors that picked CGI Federal in the first place. Read More »