Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
October 28, 2013
How is it government can put a man on the Moon but not
build a website? Photo: NASA
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, writing for USA Today, asks why the federal government was capable of
putting a man on the moon but unable to put up a functioning website.
“The 1960s space program, of course, is a classic
example of big government doing something successfully: Promising to put men on
the moon within a decade, and doing it,” writes Reynolds, who edits the
Instapundit blog.
He mentions the Norris Dam, the first dam built by
the Tennessee Valley Authority, as another admirable example of big government
doing something that actually works.
Reynolds then enumerates the failures of big
government, including the War On Poverty, the War On Drugs, the War On Cancer,
all “pretty much failures, sometimes disastrous ones.”
He writes that “it remains indisputable that the
federal government isn’t very good at delivering on big projects. The obvious
response is to not entrust the federal government with big projects on which it
can’t deliver. Instead, they should be left to those who can.”
As it turns out, however, the Obamacare website
was built by a private sector company, CGI Federal.
The vice president of the company is Toni
Townes-Whitley, a Princeton classmate of first lady Michelle Obama. It is
hardly surprising to learn that Townes-Whitley is a former big government
employee. She worked for the General Accounting Office and the Peace Corps.
Moreover, the president of the Canadian-based
company, George Schindler, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company
gained the Obamacare website contract, according to The Daily Caller.
“As reported by the Washington Examiner in early
October, the Department of Health and Human Services reviewed only CGI’s bid for
the Obamacare account,” writes Patrick Howley.
“CGI was one of 16 companies qualified under the
Bush administration to provide certain tech services to the federal government.
A senior vice president for the company testified this week before The House
Committee on Energy and Commerce that four companies submitted bids, but did not
name those companies or explain why only CGI’s bid was considered.”
Adding more grist to this textbook example of
crony capitalism, it was discovered the contract was lorded over by the Centers
for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a division Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of
Health and Human Services.
It turns out Ms. Sebelius is also a failed website
builder.
As the governor of Kansas, “Sebelius oversaw
numerous costly and disastrous government website projects during her six-year
governorship (2003-2009), including a failed update of the Department of Labor’s
program to provide unemployment pay and other services and similar updates
pertaining to the Department of Administration and the state’s Department of
Motor Vehicles (DMV) services,” Howley wrote earlier this month.
The Obama administration’s failure to build a
website is not necessarily an example of large and redundant government unable
to perform tasks better accomplished by companies in the private sector. It is
more accurately an example of crony capitalism and government-enforced
monopolistic business practices that cost Americans billions of dollars every
year.
Instead of focusing on the monopolistic aspect of
the failed project, Democrats in Congress are sidestepping the issue and calling
for more government failure.
“Right now everybody’s goal should be, let’s get
this working. Let’s make sure that people can get the health care they want and
need,” said New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. She said it is too early to assign blame
for the disaster.
Republicans are calling for Sebelius to be sacked,
but it is uncertain if the bureaucrat will lose her job.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has dispatched
the “weed whacker,” Jeff Zients, to fix the smoldering wreck that is
HealthCare.gov.
Zients, a onetime federal budget official and
deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, is a former
member of the board of directors of XM Satellite Radio. He also served on the
boards of Revolution Health Group, Best Practices and Timbuk2 Designs.
“Let me be clear — HealthCare.gov is fixable,” he told reporters on a conference call set-up by the Centers
for Medicare and Medicaid Services last week.
The question that will undoubtedly be shuffled off
to the memory hole will of course remain unaddressed: why was the project headed
up by the demonstrable failure Sebelius and parceled out in what was essentially
a no-bid contract to a former classmate of the president’s wife?
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