OFA techies talk about failed healthcare.gov rollout.

Earlier in some comments, I remarked that I thought the Obamacare exchange IT project was gargantuan - not "just a website" - and that it would have taken a world class organization to execute.

Now I'm not really a web-scale data architect, I just know some things about computers. So I was gratified when my opinions were validated... by some of the folks who worked on Obama's campaign:

The former Obama techies agree that Healthcare.gov could have avoided some kinks with more strenuous pre-launch testing. But they generally think that the administration's most ambitious technology project never had a chance. One OFA alum pegged the likelihood that a project the size of Healthcare.gov could actually be successful "in the single digits."

Good to know! It would have been nice of them to weigh in with this before now, but whatever. 

Go ahead and read the article - yeah, it's in Mother Jones but it's really pretty good.

"You don't want to live in a country where the president can get elected and then give a contract like Healthcare.gov to the CTO of his campaign, because there's a name for that: 'cronyism,'" says Clay Johnson, a founder of the Democratic firm Blue State Digital, which supplied tech for Obama's 2008 campaign. "Instead, you want to live in a country where people like Harper Reed are attracted to do business with the federal government and they're able to clearly bid on contracts that are defined by the federal government." That's not the way things work today.

Well, they got that right. Ironically, if Obama had simply turned around and tried to hire those who were perhaps the only competent people he had hired for anything, ever, they probably would have been smart enough to refuse the job.

The conclusion that Mother Jones comes to? Too much regulation in procurement. No, really. #facepalm