Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.gov

Too many lies in this article to take more from this than the bare fact that CGI Federal will be replaced by Accenture (the latter of which is no prize from what I've heard).

I.e. the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) were notoriously the "prime contractor" until the 3rd week of October (when replaced by contractor QSSI, also responsible for the "data hub"), and the attacks on the contractors are misplaced when their management was so impossibly bad.

The linked Washington Post article is not great, but better: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-administration-...

Is anyone surprised by this?

I wouldn't say I'm surprised, but it definitely is not necessarily usual.

Companies usually win contracts of this magnitude because they "have people who know people". Consequently, "CGI Federal" is, or at least was, well connected with the people in government necessary to shovel boondoggles their way. It is what it is.

I guess in this case the poor optics overcame the connections.

No shit. This whole ordeal has been nothing short of a complete and utter fucking disaster. And how much did the government pay to have this work done [1]? This is procurement at its finest. The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up who would have done a much better job utilising scalable technologies.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...

The requirements for working with the USGov are restrictive enough that only specific companies are capable of participating in the bidding process. The Democratic party itself and Obama's re-election are, by contrast, private organizations that are not limited by these rules.

Basically, it seems like the government sourcing process has shrunk the pool of potential bidders too small to provide a properly competitive marketplace for software for USGov customers.