Barack "One Bid" Obama: Massively Failed O-Care Website Project Accepted a Single Non-Competitive Bid

That's #SmartGovernment at work.

Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.

CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.

Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm.

The next part notes that Bush's DHS cleared the firm for this sort of non-competitive bid in 2007. But it was a smaller company then, and I imagine they thought they were clearing it for light-and-quick website design work without going through the longer federal bidding process.

posted by Ace at 01:43 PM

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