If your comment isn't simply rhetorical, there was a lot of coverage of the root cause: the federal procurement process is a mess, which is especially harmful f

If your comment isn't simply rhetorical, there was a lot of coverage of the root cause: the federal procurement process is a mess, which is especially harmful for IT. A quick summary is Clay Johnson and Harper Reed's oped from last year: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/opinion/getting-to-the-bottom-of-healthcaregovs-flop.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/opinion/getting-to-the-bot... For a longer read, you might enjoy a Clay's essay on fixing procurement that delves a bit deeper: http://dobtco.github.io/fixing-procurement-ebook/final/fixing-procurement-ebook/ http://dobtco.github.io/fixing-procurement-ebook/final/fixin... It sort of fails to convey the scope of how enormous, byzantine, and Kafkaesque the whole system is, however. For a hint of that, you can try clicking through https://www.itdashboard.gov/ https://www.itdashboard.gov/ (remember, this didn't exist before the huge efforts of Open Government Initiative pushed in the Obama admin) - it's still completely opaque who runs, bids, owns, or works on any project. There's some more detail about how the bidding process for Healthcare.gov went down: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/meet-cgi-federal-the-company-behind-the-botched-launch-of-healthcare-gov/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/m... CGI Federal's bidding actually preceded the conception of Healthcare.gov! They were one of 16 companies certified for a $4B contract via a GWAC (that means if you weren't one of those contractors, you couldn't even be in the running). The way that GSA scheduling works pretty much guarantees that you won't get small effective teams building lean/effective tech. CGI Federal of course was only part of the picture: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/25/240532575/a-diagram-of-healthcare-gov-based-on-the-people-who-built-it http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/25/240532... There was some interesting tech analysis of how this actually played out in terms of the data flow: http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/apm/technical-deep-dive-whats-impacting-healthcare-gov/ http://www.appdynamics.com/blog/apm/technical-deep-dive-what... The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (HR 1232) would help. It was introduced back in March 2013 and has slowly making it's way through, but basically doesn't have any traction and is IMO pretty endemic and a great example of the type of deep regulatory/legislative dysfunction at the Federal level. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr1232 https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr1232 https://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/1232 https://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/123... Of course, all this information is readily available, so the indirect answer is that things are the way they are because more people don't care enough to fix things.