One President's Halliburton is Another President's CGI Federal

One of the many things that made President George W. Bush one of the most hated Presidents ever among Democrats and others on the left was the use, and we felt THE ABUSE, of NO BID CONTRACTS going to friends, classmates, crony's and lobbyists who had an inside track into the Bush Administration.

Investigations into the NO BID CONTRACTS were a staple of the nightly news on the major networks, articles in The Huffington Post, blog entries in The Daily KOZ and conversations everywhere.

Ultimately the issue of no bid contracts became so large it was a major campaign issue for candidate Barack Obama.  There is no doubt in my mind that his promise to "END NO BID CONTRACTS FOR GOOD" was a major factor leading to his election.

The generally left leaning BUZZ FEED has even put up a montage of Obama's many speeches promising to end NO BID CONTRACTS.  Click on the link above to see them all or just check out the one I've republished below:




Of course now we find that Kathleen Sebelius' Health and Human Services Department awarded a four hundred million dollar ($400,000,000.00) to CGI Federal, a Canadian company with close ties to Barack and Michelle Obama and the Obama Administration with absolutely NO BID. 

What's worse, especially after listening to Barack Obama's speech above, there were actually four other companies who attempted to submit bids for the ACA (ObamaCare) contract and those bids were never opened or reviewed by the Administration. CGI Federal got exactly the kind of insider sweetheart deal given behind closed doors that candidate Obama PROMISED to end forever if he were elected President. 

But, as it turns out, CGI Federal is used to getting no bid contracts with a license to siphon off federal funds. The AP is reporting today about a major failure on the part of the government to distribute funds to the victims of Hurricane Sandy. 

Congress allocated $1.7 BILLION for Hurricane Sandy Relief and hired CGI Federal, without any bidding, as a consultant to aid in the allocation of the funds. Although 24,000 family is desperate need have filled out the applications for aid, only a paltry 1.2% of the money has ever been distributed. Everyone else is still waiting. 

In this case, the government and CGI Federal are a bigger disaster than the hurricane itself. 

Of course no one is ever held accountable in the Obama Administration. When quizzed, they all, from Barack Obama on down, admit "mistakes were made." But then they quickly add the important thing is to "look forward" and "fix the problem."  

Looking forward is Washington code for "spend even more money." 

Barack Obama is no where near our worst President ever. But he easily is the President who has consistently told the most outright lies when campaigning for office or campaigning for his pet projects. 

It's his own little version of a "no bid contract."  

A Lesson We Liberals MUST Learn

The ObamaCare roll out somehow managed to be more flawed than the horrific law itself. As impossible as it seems, the initial introduction of President Obama's prize accomplishment from his first term is, so far, one of the biggest embarrassments in the entire history of our government.

And each and every day it gets worse.

The President's biggest allies for the first two weeks were the hapless Republicans who stole the spotlight from the ObamaCare introduction with their ill advised government shutdown.  President Obama ought to write Senator Ted Cruz a "Thank You" note". 

The biggest error the President made was letting the shutdown be settled.  Two weeks was not long enough to fix the flawed website design. And once the shutdown ended, the press and blogosphere turned its full attention to ObamaCare.

Speaking of mistakes, President Obama's second largest mistake was not to accept the Republican DEMAND that ObamaCare's mandates be delayed a full year.  He needs that time (which could have easily buried the issue past the 2014 election) to fix this mess.

Actually biggest problem is the ObamaCare Law itself, but that is for another blog entry in a few weeks.  Today we, as Liberals, need to learn one critically important lesson: The Government Should NEVER Do Anything EVER!

If we love people, if we want fairness, if we demand the folks get full value with no waste, programs like Universal Health Care need to be turned over to the private sector. We can legislate universality, fairness and value and we can hire inspectors to make certain the law is accomplished, but GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT RUN THE PROGRAM.

We, the taxpayers, spent $680,000,000.00 on bad code, poor design, insane logic, zero testing and no results.  By contrast Facebook's website was started at less than $80 million. Twitter at less than $300 million. And there are countless other examples.  And they all work.

The problem lies in government management, the bidding process and the sheer bureaucracy that permits no innovation and allows no decision to ever be made. 

Megan Neal pointed out over on the Motherboard Website (not a political site, but an IT site) that the bureaucratic morass of bidding on government contracts guarantees no qualified company will ever win a contract or even bid on one.  

     The "procurement" process of government contracts is so labyrinthine, the administration has to hire firms that are adept at the process, even if that means they're not sufficiently adept at the actual task. As a result, despite a government budget of $80 billion a year for information-technology services, federal web services wind up clunky and glitchy like they're stuck in the dial-up age.

Today many are calling for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to be fired for incompetence. Indeed she is totally incompetent and ought to be fired. In any private company she would have been long gone, years ago. But politics, not competency rule Washington.  And that is exactly why programs should always be delegated to the private sector.  Yes, private companies will make a profit but, like Amazon, they will get the job done for less taxpayer dollars with better results.

As Liberals we hate giving profit for needed services to the private sector.  Yet we waste many times the money for vastly inferior services.  We must learn to Legislate and Regulate, instead of trying to Implement the program in the systemically incompetent government sector.