Petition #1: Federal Contracting Regulations

An Open Letter to President Obama and His Administration:

I was moved to write to you today regarding a concern we both share: government waste. I have been privileged to serve our nation’s interests as an Information Technology Contractor for over nine years, and am no stranger to several significant sources of waste.

First, let me say that I am a staunch Democrat; I actually “enjoy” paying my taxes and seeing my money put to good use serving the public. This, in my view, is what any competent government should do – serve its people through basic products and services that improve society as a whole (e.g. roads, healthcare, parks, safety, etc.). What I don’t like to see, however, is my money being wasted when government agencies spend literally millions of dollars paying private companies to do the same job over and over again, failing each time to deliver the product or services promised.

In my opinion, the IT acquisitions process of the federal government is fundamentally broken, particularly with regard to software development services. All too often, expediency and cost are prioritized above quality, resulting in deliverables that do not meet the needs they were intended for. Consequently, this often demands even more work and wasted expense (usually to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars) to “fix” the system that should have been implemented correctly in the first place. The most evident example that is being hammered in the media right now is the healthcare.gov website. There have been others, of course; there are countless examples of poor software implementation resulting in expensive rework and delays in delivery of necessary business functionality. The project I currently support has even suffered from this dilemma. The most baffling and frustrating situation is when the contractor who caused the problem in the first place, is subsequently paid more money to fix their own system. I’m sure you can see how this incentivizes poor product among the less ethical contracting corporations (of which there are many). I am proud to say that I work for a contractor that does not operate this way, but this letter is not about them, or even me; it’s about what the government can and should do to address this problem.

The following are some of the factors that I have witnessed directly contributing to this troubling situation:

1. Lowest Cost Technically Acceptable – The LCTA criteria for contract awards, while I’m sure is well-intentioned, often does not end up meeting its own definition. It might end up being the lowest initial cost, but usually products that are developed to be “acceptable”, rather than more flattering adjectives (e.g. “great”, “wonderful”, “outstanding”) lack the robustness and scalability required by many government agencies. The inevitable result is costly rework.
2. “Bait and Switch” Contracting – A technique employed by some contracting companies is to have their most knowledgeable and technically proficient personnel draft a stellar proposal that lays out a high-quality software design, and then, upon winning the work, “swap in” much less competent developers who may have no idea how to rightly implement the proposed solution. Obviously, using their cheapest and least talented developers for implementation increases the profit margin realized by the corporation, but it often ends up short-changing the government.
3. Oversight Delegated to Contractors – In CIO shops that I have seen, the technical expertise needed to validate technical software designs, performance requirements, and code quality often resides with contractors rather than government personnel. Most egregiously, the software is sometimes “validated” by the same contractor performing the development! I believe the technical oversight should reside with government personnel, who are capable of holding contractors immediately accountable for poor design, architecture or code.
4. Government Turnover – An unfortunate reality of many IT shops is that personnel move around. Large-scale system development efforts can last much longer than the tenure of a single government lead, a branch chief, or indeed a President. The government lead today may have an entirely different idea of how a system should be developed than the person who sat in their chair up until a week ago. One set of stakeholders may provide a completely new direction after the software has already been under development for six months. This type of instability on the government side is not the contractor’s fault, but can dramatically impact delivery timelines and thus overall development costs.

Now I certainly do not claim to have the solution to all of the above shortcomings, but you and your Department heads should certainly be aware of why and where much of the IT budgets are being wasted.

I know we are both fans of Jon Stewart (you having appeared on his show multiple times), and he had a great bit last night about the state of the healthcare.gov website. As hilarious as it was, though, it really struck a nerve with me, since I have observed so much of the same over my nine years working for the federal government; this is simply the highest-profile example, and has thus caught media attention. Altogether, however, I’m sure that millions, likely billions, of dollars have been wasted on incompetent system development efforts and needless rework. This is definitely a situation that needs to be improved if we are to get our government’s IT acquisitions process back on track and, more importantly, regain the trust of the American people that our government can deliver the products and services it promises.

Respectfully Yours,

A Concerned Citizen