Author Archives: Alex

Farewell, Thomas.gov. Hello, Congress.gov.

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On November 19th, Thomas.gov, the venerable website of the United States Congress, will begin to redirect visitors to Congress.gov. The new site, which launched in beta in September 2012, will become the primary governmental resource for the text of legislation, past, present and future, along with reports from committees, speeches from the floor of Congress and cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

While the official announcement was made today by the Library of Congress, Thomas.gov’s custodian, leading headlines about Congress trading in the new Congress.gov and a note in Roll Call, the transition from THOMAS.gov to Congress.gov has been going on all fall, including updates to the new site and launching the Constitution Annotated and associated app.

THOMAS is centuries old, at least as measured in terms of Internet time. Launched in January of 1995, Thomas.gov was one of the first 23,000 websites to go online. When it went live the Internet had a worldwide user base of less than 40 million people, the majority of whom surfed the young World Wide Web using Mosaic and Netscape, checked their email on Eudora and dialed in on America Online. Watch the video below to get a sense of what life was like online nearly two decades ago.

Today, Thomas.gov receives, on average, 10 million visits every year, although I suspect many of those visits come from wonky repeat customers in or around the District of Columbia. I have no servers logs to prove that one way or another, but THOMAS has long been alternately beloved of or bemoaned by Congressional staffers and correspondents, all of whom have had to rely upon its increasingly creaky infrastructure for nearly two decades as the national repository of legislation and reports. So, too, have millions of Americans around the rest of the country who want to read proposed bills.

While incremental improvements to search and sharing in recent years have improved the site, for a decade people interested in tracking Congress have increasingly turned to sites like Govtrack or the New York Times for data created by scraping THOMAS. What does that mean, in practice? While Congress.gov will be official source of information, until its operators move to act as a platform for legislative data instead of a portal for legislative information. Open government advocates have been calling for the release of bulk legislative data for many years, culminating in frustration this September when a Library of Congress cost estimate acknowledged that Congress.gov “was not designed specifically to facilitate the extraction of the data as XML documents for bulk download.”

Putting the issue of bulk data aside, the new Congress.gov is an immense improvement on THOMAS in every way, as I reported last year:

Tapping into a growing trend in government new media, the new Congress.gov features responsive design, adapting to desktop, tablet or smartphone screens. It’s also search-centric, with Boolean search and, in an acknowledgement that most of its visitors show up looking for information, puts a search field front and center in the interface. The site includes member profiles for U.S. Senators and Representatives, with associated legislative work. In a nod to a mainstay of social media and media websites, the new Congress.gov also has a “most viewed bills” list that lets visitors see at a glance what laws or proposals are gathering interest online.

Since September 2012 digital staff at the Law Library of Congress have been busy since the Congress.gov launched in beta, adding new features and context at a steady pace, including adding the Congressional Record, committee reports, standing committee pages, and the ability to “Search within results.”

On November 19th, when THOMAS is retired, the social media outposts of the site will also transition. @THOMASDotGov will transition its more than 15,500 followers to a new identity.

In a press release, the Library of Congress indicated that the old site will remain accessible from the Congress.gov homepage through late 2014. After that, historians may have to hope that the National Archives adopts whatever code or data retains historical interest into its servers, lest it moulder and succumb to bitrot — unfortunately, the configuration of the robots.txt file for Thomas.gov appears to have prevented the Internet Archive from preserving its iterations over the years.

If you’re interested in learning how to use the new Congress.gov, you can register at beta.congress.gov/help for training sessions scheduled for November 14, January 16, March 11 and March 16.

When digital government supports open government

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As I looked back at the annual Open Government Partnership Summit in London, I was struck by how much technology continues to dominate discussion, particularly when many of the issues that confront people and governments around the world are political or systemic, and thus resistant to simply “fixes.”

Given that so many of the new country commitments for the partnership either involve improving the use of technology or are enabled by technology, it’s tempting to frame the release of government data and other digital efforts as efforts that will primarily serve elites, not the poor, and to warn of the encroachment of commercial interests in that delivery.

The years ahead will be messy, full of anger, violence, ignorance and the worst of human nature, expressed in political conflicts and entrenched institutions and industries fighting against a rising tide of populism and industrial disruption fueled by an explosion of connection technologies.

Near the end of 2013, the majority of humanity is living through the consequences of wars, natural disasters, disease, food shortages or inequality in access to resources. On many days, access to healthy food, electricity and clean water are critical needs. Access to information, however, has rapidly become critical in this new millennium.

That such information will be delivered through the Internet and mobile devices is clearly one of the megatrends of this decade. Similarly, access to one another through those same devices, mediated by social media and video, is shifting how we all can understand, document and experience the world.

While 56% of American adults now own a smartphone, the rest of the world hasn’t hasn’t caught up yet. That’s changing quickly, however, as the cost of mobile hardware continues to drop. There have now been over 1 billion Android activations worldwide. As cheaper smartphones and tablets become available, and more wireless Internet access rolls out through ISPs, mesh networks and perhaps even Google blimps, the pressure to provide digital services will only increase.

Why all the hullabaloo? Isn’t this just “e-government redux,” with phones? It would also be a gross mistake to view digital government as simply rebranding or scaling the existing approaches to buying, building and maintaining government IT.

Unfortunately, the bad news here is that government technology around the world is dominated by regulations, tangled hiring practices and procurement policies that get in the way of building important software, along with politics and poor management. The good news is that the example of the United Kingdom’s new Government Digital Services team shows a potential way forward for building a digital core for 21st century government online.

Adopting a digital government strategy is not the same as moving to a system of government more open and accountable to the people, as a comparison of the democratic accountability in countries as diverse as Singapore, Denmark, Iran and Brazil demonstrate.

Given that technology can and will underpin many efforts to reduce corruption, improve accountability and empower citizen activism and public engagement, dismissing the importance of public-private partnerships or digital government initiatives as inherently “ephemeral” would be a mistake in this young century.

As the DATA Act goes up for markup in Senate, will its Recovery.gov model survive?

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There will be a markup for the DATA Act (S.994) in U.S. Senate today. The bill, which passed the House, would standardize federal spending and publish it in a similar way as the Recovery Act, which proved to be a successful test case for open data. A proposed amendment to the DATA Act, however, is facing opposition from the same good government groups that supported its passage in the House of Representatives.

Update: The DATA Act passed markup with the amendment.

The amendment, which removes the “accountability platform” from the legislation, faced criticism from the author of the original bill, Hudson Hollister. Hollister emailed the following comment to Federal News Radio:

“Without the accountability platform, there will be no mechanism for inspectors general to use the newly-standardized federal spending data, combined with public and private data sources, to suss out waste and fraud. If the final version of the bill fails to expand the Recovery Operations Center to cover all federal spending, taxpayers’ interests will be hurt in two ways. First, waste and fraud that could have been illuminated and eliminated will go undetected. Second — and perhaps more important — without any internal government effort to use the newly-standardized spending data for any purpose, there will be no internal pressure to improve the quality of data published on USASpending.gov. We recognize that the accountability platform was removed in order to reduce the bill’s Congressional Budget Office score. We hope that an offset large enough to restore those provisions can be included in the bill at a later stage.”

A coalition of good government groups are calling for the the DATA Act to be passed as introduced, not “as amended,” submitting a letter to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to that effect. (Below.)

DATA Act – Letter of Support to Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee – 11-05-2013

Prospects for the DATA Act’s passage in the Senate do appear improved over last year, where it foundered in committee, but the form it will emerge from today’s markup in is unclear.

Hollister is warning that the removal of the requirement for a data analytics platform from the bill, modeled on Recovery.gov, would be a mistake and lead to same kinds of data quality issues that exist at the SEC.

Citing a study from Columbia Business School which evaluates the state and future of interactive data at the SEC, Hollister says the platform is a key tool for government inspectors general to examine spending data, which then creates an internal incentive to correct errors. Given the reality that “armchair auditors” have yet to emerge in the United Kingdom to look at similar data, improving the capacity of the IGs to find fraud, waste and abuse is critical.

In advocating for retention of the platform (the “accountability hub”), Hollister suggested that its estimated $20 million dollar cost will be more than balanced by the amount of fraud detected.

“Open data is no good unless it’s accurate,” writes Hollister. “The SEC’s experience shows that the only way to generate internal pressure for accurate spending data will be if the federal government is actively using that data.”

Congressional bills could cripple FOIA requests for feedlot data from the EPA

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UPDATE: The final version of the Farm Bill that passed both houses of Congress did not contain this amendment.

On the one hand, the White House is committing (again) to modernizing the administration of the Freedom of Information Act  and touting a new effort to open up agricultural data:

On the other, there are now multiple efforts to bar access to agricultural information sprouting on Capitol Hill. Open government advocates successfully stalled an amendment on farm bill secrecy this spring. The amendment is back, in multiple places.

The Farm Bill poses a great threat to the public’s right to know about agricultural and livestock operations.

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OpentheGovernment.org is warning that multiple bills could limit the EPA from releasing data relevant to the public interest:

The Senators who proposed the Farm Bill amendment, Senators Grassley and Donnelly, recently introduced an identical bill, and similar language appears in the House-passed version of the Farm Bill (Sec. 450) and the House Appropriations Committee’s version of the 2014 Interior spending bill (Sec. 11325). The sponsors say the language is intended to address the EPA’s release of information related to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) to environmental groups earlier this year. After hearing concerns about the amount of private information included in the release, EPA requested the groups return the original information (which the groups did) and committed to redacting all private information from similar releases in the future.

The language some Members of Congress are trying to make a part of the law goes well beyond the stated objectives. Rather than appropriately protecting private information, the language cuts off all public access to any information the EPA has collected on any owner, operator, or employee of a livestock operation (the language in the House-passed farm bill is even broader — barring the release of information on agricultural operations as well as livestock operations). In other words, the language would not just prevent the EPA from releasing private information about a local farmer with a few pigs or heads of cattle, it would broadly shield the information of corporate operations. The language also ignores the possible public interest in release of the information. If passed, the language would completely cut off access to information that is especially critical for people who live near or share waterways with CAFOs.

To be clear, these are not minor exceptions.

The authors of the Senate bill are “trying to create a huge hole in the FOIA by blocking the EPA from releasing any information it has collected on any owner, operator, or employee of a livestock operation,” writes Scott A. Hodes at the FOIA Blog.

“The language in the House-passed farm bill is even broader, barring the release of information on agricultural operations as well as livestock operations. …There may be a valid reason to not release information about small family farms, but the language in some of these proposals go way past that point and would create a huge Exemption 3 statute that blocks information that the public deserves to be known from being released via the FOIA.

According to OpenSecrets.org, the campaign committees and leadership PACs of the sponsors of the bill, Senator Charles Grassley and Senator Joe Donnelly, have received $458,750 and $104, 891 from agribusiness, respectively.

To date, S.1343 hasn’t garnered much attention in the press or online at POPVOX and OpenCongress. That’s unfortunate. While the repeated release of personally identifiable information in FOIA documents by the Environmental Protection Agency clearly merits Congressional attention and oversight, these amendments are a gross overreaction to the disclosures and stand to damage the public interest.

Given the importance of public access to information about agriculture, particularly the large feedlots that provide the majority of the beef Americans consume and attendant food safety issues, limiting broad disclosure from the EPA would be a huge step backwards for open government in the United States.

Update: More than 40 organizations have joined OpenTheGovernment.org to urge Congress not to include language that cuts off public access to this information, sending a letter (embedded below) to the committee.

As the letter points out, people who live near agricultural and livestock operations – particularly people who live near concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) – need access to information about these operations in order to ensure their health and safety. The law already requires federal agencies, when responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information about these operations, to protect personal privacy, including email addresses, phone numbers, and other similar information of non-government individuals. Indeed, after determining that it improperly released personal information related to CAFOs earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asked requesters who had received the information to return it to the agency. The requesters complied.

Beyond being unnecessary to protect personal privacy, language included in the House-passed version of the Farm Bill is exceedingly broad and vague. Because it does not define the terms “owners” or “operators,” it would extend FOIA’s personal privacy protections to corporate farms. In FEC vs. ATT, the Supreme Court found that Congress never intended to extend the FOIA’s personal privacy protections to corporations, and Congress must not do so now.

[Image Credit: POGO]

McKinsey estimates open data could add more than $3 trillion in economic value

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According to a new McKinsey report, “research suggests that seven sectors alone could generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value as a result of open data, which is already giving rise to hundreds of entrepreneurial businesses and helping established companies to segment markets, define new products and services, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of operations.”

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That’s a mighty big carrot to open up public sector data to the public, keeping in mind potential privacy, political and national security consequences of doing so carelessly.

A growing number of open data entrepreneurs are mining these embryonic markets, finding fertile soil using different business models that focus on adding value to a national resource: data collected for the people, released back to the people.

In depth: news and analysis about the troubles behind Healthcare.gov

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Over the past 27 days, as I’ve steadily shared analysis and links on what went wrong in the botched re(launch) of Healthcare.gov on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, I’ve also been talking in more depth about what went wrong on various media outlets, including:

Last week, the Obama administration announced a plan to fix the issues with the software behind HealthCare.gov, including putting QSSI in charge of as the “general contractor” and prioritizing fixing errors in 834 file data first, with the goal of have the system functioning end-to-end by November 30.

The teams of Presidential Innovation Fellows and “A List” contractors in the “tech surge” to fix the software have a tough challenge ahead of them. According to reporting from The New York Times and The Washington Post,  Healthcare.gov wasn’t tested as a complete system until the last week of September, when it crashed with only a few hundred users.

Despite the issues revealed by this limited testing, government officials signed off on it launching anyway, and thus was born a historic government IT debacle whose epic proportions may still expand further.

Should the White House have delayed?

“When faced with go live pressures, I tell my staff the following:

‘If you go live months late when you’re ready, no one will ever remember. If you go live on time, when you’re not ready, no one will ever forget.”-Dr. John Halamka, CIO Beth Israel Deaconness Hospital

In retrospect, the administration might have been better served by not launching on October 1st, something that was within HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ legal purview. After all, would the federal government launch a battleship that had a broken engine, faulty wiring or non-functional weapons systems into an ongoing fight? This software wasn’t simply “buggy” at launch — It was broken. These weren’t “glitches” caused by traffic, although the surge of traffic did expose where the system didn’t work quickly. Now that a reported 90% of users are able to register, other issues on the backend that are just beginning to become clear, from subsidy calculation to enrollment data to insurers reporting issues with what they are receiving to serious concerns about system security.

Based upon what we know about troubles at Healthcare.gov, it appears that people from the industry that were brought in to test the Healthcare.gov system a month ago urged CMS not to go live. It also appears that inside the agency who saw what was going on warned leadership months in advance that the system hadn’t been tested end-to-end. Anyone building enterprise software should have the code locked down in the final month and stopped introducing new features 3-6 months prior. Instead, it appears new requirements kept coming in and development continued to the end. The result is online now. (Or offline, as the case may be.)

On September 30, President Obama could have gone before the American people and said that the software was clearly not ready, explained why and told Americans that his administration wouldn’t push it live until they knew the system would work. HHS could have published a downloadable PDF of an application that could be mailed in and a phone number on the front page, added more capacity to the call centers and paper processing. It’s notable that three weeks later, that’s pretty much what President Obama said they have done.

The failed launch isn’t just about “optics,” politics or the policy of the Affordable Care Act itself, which is a far greater shift in how people in the United States browse, buy, compare and consume health insurance and services. A working system represents the faith and trust of the American people in the ability of government. This is something Jennifer Pahlka has said that resonates: how government builds websites and software matters, given the expectations that people now have for technology. The administration has handed the opponents of the law an enormous club to bash them with now — and they’ll deserve every bit of hard criticism they get, given this failure to execute on a signature governance initiative.

Articles worth reading on Healthcare.gov and potential reforms

  • Whenever I see Fred Trotter, I’m reminded that he’s forgotten more about open source software and healthcare IT than I’m ever likely to learn. Last week, he talked with Ezra Klein about the issues with Healthcare.gov
  • Ezra Klein also talked  to Clay Johnson about the lessons of Healthcare.gov (hint: procurement, project management and insourcing)
  • Tough reporting on failures in e-government is critical to improving those services for all, but particularly for the poor.
  • A post by Development Seed founder Eric Gunderson on the open source front-end for Healthcare.gov: “It’s called Jekyll, and it works.”
  • Rusty Foster on Healthcare.gov: it could have been worse. This failure to (re)launch just happened under vastly more political scrutiny and deadlines set by Congress. The FBI’s Sentinel program, by contrast, had massive issues — but you didn’t see the Speaker of the House tweeting out bug reports or cable news pundits opining about issues. The same is true of many other huge software projects.
  • A must-read op-ed by former Obama campaign CTO Harper Reed and Blue State Digital co-founder and former Presidential Innovation Fellow Clay Johnson on what ails government IT, adding much-needed context to what ailed Healthcare.gov
  • A Mother Jones interview that asked whether Reed and other former campaign staff could fix Healthcare.gov. (Spoiler: No.)
  • If not those folks, then how should the administration fix Healthcare.gov? In the larger sense, either the federal government will reform how it buys, builds and maintains software, through a combination of reforming procurement with modular contracting, bringing more technologists into government, and adopting open source and agile development processes …or this will just keep happening. The problems go much deeper that a “website.”
  • Ezra Klein pulled all of these pieces together in a feature on the “broken promise of better government through technology” at the end of the month. (He may have been heard in the Oval Office, given that the president has said he reads him.) Speaking at an “Organizing for America” event on November 4th, President Obama acknowledged the problem. “…I, personally, have been frustrated with the problems around the website on health care,” he said, “And it’s inexcusable, and there are a whole range of things that we’re going to need to do once we get this fixed – to talk about federal procurement when it comes to IT and how that’s organized…”
  • The issues behind Healthcare.gov cannot only be ascribed to procurement or human resources, as Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin reported in the Washington Post: insularity and political sensitivity were a central factor behind the launch..

    Based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and outsiders who worked alongside them, the project was hampered by the White House’s political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law — sensitivity so intense that the president’s aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition. Inside the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the main agency responsible for the exchanges, there was no single administrator whose full-time job was to manage the project. Republicans also made clear they would block funding, while some outside IT companies that were hired to build the Web site, HealthCare.gov, performed poorly.

  • What could be done next? Congress might look across the Atlantic Ocean for an example. After one massive IT failure too many, at the National Health Service the United Kingdom created and empowered a Government Digital Services team. UK Executive Director of Digital Mike Bracken urged U.S. to adopt a digital core.”
  • In the video below, Clay Johnson goes deep on what went wrong with Healthcare.gov and suggests ways to fix it.

  • Can the White House and Congress take on the powerful entrenched providers in Washington & do the same? I’m not optimistic, unfortunately, given the campaign contributions and lobbying prowess of those entities, but it’s not an impossible prospect. I’ll write more about it in the future.

Coalition presses White House to make secret surveillance laws open to the public

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A coalition of organizations that support open government, press freedom and civil liberties have sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to make the laws that govern surveillance by the National Security Agency public. The letter, which I’ve published in full below, asks the constitutional law professor living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to support a core principle of democratic governance that hails back (at least as far as) the 12 Tables posted in the Roman Forum: the people should be able to read the laws under which they are governed. The letter was sent to the White House on the eve of the second annual conference of the Open Government Partnership.

October 21, 2013
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama:
On behalf of citizens who support an open and accountable government, we are writing to urge you to pledge as part of the US’s new round of Open Government Partnership commitments to curb the secret law that enabled the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs to become much broader and more invasive than it was believed the law allowed.
Secret legal interpretations by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowed the NSA’s surveillance programs to grow in ways that raise serious concerns about what the government is doing in our name and the extent of violations of American’s privacy and civil liberties. Documents released to the media about the NSA’s programs further raise critical questions about the scope of the US’s activities abroad, leading the President of Brazil and others to question whether the US’s programs breach international law.
This is not the first time that abuses of power have occurred when a government program operates in a bubble of secrecy with only limited oversight: similarly, Americans were outraged to learn that memos authored by the OLC during the Bush Administration approved interrogation methods that many equate to torture. Your release of these memos demonstrated a respect for the public’s right to know how the government interprets the law. Making a concrete commitment to the public’s right to legal interpretations on issues including the intelligence community’s surveillance programs and other controversial policies like targeted killing through the use of drones or other means would make this respect part of the administration’s legacy. While the government has an obligation to protect properly and appropriately classified information, democracy does not thrive when our national security programs and the intelligence community’s actions are shrouded in secrecy. The public must, at the very least, have a shared understanding of the bounds and limits of the laws of our land and be able to have an informed debate about our policies.
During the meeting of the Open Government Partnership in London, you have a unique opportunity to address this issue head-on on an international stage. By committing to give the public access to documents that significantly interpret laws, including – but not limited to—the Department of Justice’s legal interpretations and opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), you can both address domestic concerns about our surveillance programs, and begin to rebuild trust with our international partners.
Thank you in advance for your attention to this issue of critical importance to transparent and accountable government. To discuss these issues in greater detail, please contact Patrice McDermott, Executive Director of OpenTheGovernment.org, at pmcdermott@openthegovernment.org or 202-332- 6736.
Sincerely,
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression American Civil Liberties Union
American Library Association
American Society of News Editors
Arab American Institute
ARTICLE 19
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Brechner Center for Freedom of Information
Californians Aware
Center for Democracy and Technology
Center for Effective Government
Center for Media and Democracy
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington – CREW The Constitution Project
Council on American-Islamic Relations – CAIR
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Privacy Information Center – EPIC
Essential Information
Federation of American Scientists
First Amendment Foundation
Government Accountability Project – GAP
Human Right Watch

iSolon.org
James Madison Project
Just Foreign Policy
Liberty Coalition
National Coalition Against Censorship
National Freedom of Information Coalition National Security Archive
No More Guantanamos
OpenTheGovernment.org
PolitiHacks
Project On Government Oversight – POGO
Public Citizen
Public Knowledge
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Reporters Without Borders
Society of Professional Journalists
Sunlight Foundation
Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University Understanding Government
Vermont Coalition for Open Government
Vermont Press Association
Washington Civil Rights Council
Win Without War

2013 Code for America Summit convenes civic innovators in San Francisco [LIVEBLOG]

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Hello from San Francisco! I’ll be liveblogging from the 2013 Code for America Summit for the next 2 days. You can tune in here.

Readers should also be aware of an important disclosure: Code for America paid for the costs of my travel to and from San Francisco and has further engaged me to produce paid analysis of the themes extant at the event. Part of our agreement, however, was that the organization would have no editorial control or discretion with respect to what I write about the event, organization, partners or constituents.

Report by Committee to Protect Journalists hammers Obama administration record on transparency

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Leading the day in the world of open government is a mammoth report from the Committee to Protect Journalists on the Obama administration and the press, by Leonard Downie Jr., with reporting by Sara Rafsky.

Much of this won’t be new to those who have been tracking secrecy, over-classification, prosecution of whistleblowers and selective disclosure of favorable information using new media and leaks — all core open government issues — but this pulls together those issues into a coherent whole. Abstract:

“U.S. President Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen short of his promise. Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press. Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists.”

While I find prosecution of whistleblowers, insider threats and the aggressive surveillance of journalists investigating national security and the surveillance state (meta!) to be particularly problematic, there are also significant issues around FOIA compliance and access to officials.

“The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” writes Downie

As press freedom goes, so to does open government and democracy. I’ll be making this point strongly in London in a few weeks.

Following up on the botched (re)launch of Healthcare.gov

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Over the weekend, federal officials finally confirmed that coding errors and other tech issues existed with Healthcare.gov, after days of saying high traffic was at issue. As people who have attempted to use the federal site know, however, problems with account creation and subsidy calculations system prevented the vast majority of users from enrolling in the first week. The Wall Street Journal places the tech issues with initial authentication and the system built to calculate insurance subsidies, both built by CGI Global, along with assorted other bugs.

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In a statement, a spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services claimed that things were getting better:

“The work done to increase access to HealthCare.gov in light of the overwhelming demand is beginning to show results. Call center wait times are seconds, not minutes, and people have been enrolling over the phone 24/7. Our work to expand the site’s capacity has led to more people successfully applying for and enrolling in affordable health coverage online, with wait times being shortened by approximately 50 percent since Friday.”

Separately, a spokesperson for the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) said that several fixes for IT issues went in while the site was down, adding dedicated servers for the registration and authentication components that were preventing the vast majority of users from creating accounts. Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether that fix alone will address other issues people are having.

Specifically, “engineers at Web-hosting company Media Temple Inc. found a glut of stray software code that served no purpose they could identify. They also said basic Web-efficiency techniques weren’t used, such as saving parts of the website that change infrequently so they can be loaded more quickly.”

To put it another way, fixing the account creation and authentication steps could well expose the next set of tech issues with the marketplace on Healthcare.gov, from calculating subsidies to enabling digital enrollment.

What’s behind the mess? Earlier today I made my first appearance on Washington Post TV, breaking down what went wrong with the launch of Healthcare.gov, from why it might have happened to what’s being done to fix it to the really big deadline for it to work, in mid-December.

More to come.

Federal officials are urging patience while engineers make more improvements to the system. To date, only a few thousand people are estimated to have made it through the tech issues to enroll, out of a reported 9 million visitors to date.