Op-Ed Contributors: Getting to the Bottom of HealthCare.gov’s Flop

For the first time in history, a president has had to stand in the Rose Garden to apologize for a broken Web site. But HealthCare.gov is only the latest episode in a string of information technology debacles by the federal government. Indeed, according to the research firm the Standish Group, 94 percent of large federal information technology projects over the past 10 years were unsuccessful — more than half were delayed, over budget, or didn’t meet user expectations, and 41.4 percent failed completely.

For example, Sam.gov, a system for government contractors developed by I.B.M. that started in 2012, has cost taxpayers $181 million and is just now beginning to work as expected. Before that, a new version of USAJobs.gov landed with a thud, after years during which millions were spent. In 2001, the F.B.I. started a virtual case file system, and after dumping the project, renaming it, and finding new vendors to build it, the project, “Sentinel,” managed to see the light of day just last year.

Clearly, these failures — though they are not as well known to the public — extend far beyond Barack Obama’s presidency. But this latest stings more than the others. Perhaps that’s because it comes from a president who is seen as a transformational figure, who has had to watch his signature achievement be held hostage by that most banal of captors: a clunky computer system.

So why is it that the technology available to Mr. Obama as president doesn’t compare to the technology he used to win an election? Much of the problem has to do with the way the government buys things. The government has to follow a code called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is more than 1,800 pages of legalese that all but ensure that the companies that win government contracts, like the ones put out to build HealthCare.gov, are those that can navigate the regulations best, but not necessarily do the best job. That’s evidenced by yesterday’s Congressional testimony by the largest of the vendors, CGI Federal, which blamed everyone but itself when asked to explain the botched rollout of the new Web site.

But maybe there’s hope. In 2004, campaign contracting was a lot like government contracting is today: full of large, entrenched vendors providing subpar services. Howard Dean changed that by reaching out to a new breed of Internet-savvy companies and staffers (including one of us). In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney thanks in part to a mix of private-sector-trained technology workers and a well-developed ecosystem of technologies available from competitive consultants.

This latest failure is frustrating for us to watch. Our careers have largely been about developing technology that allows more people to participate in the way we finance, support and elect candidates for public office. Together, we’ve done things that transformed elections, but we now need that work to carry into transforming government.

Government should be as participatory and as interactive with its citizens as our political process is. A digital candidate will never be able to become a digital president if he can’t bring the innovation that helped him win election into the Oval Office to help him govern.

HealthCare.gov needs to be fixed. We believe that in a few days it will be. As Mr. Obama said last week after the government shutdown ended, “There’s no good reason why we can’t govern responsibly, despite our differences, without lurching from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis.” There’s no good reason we can’t code responsibly, either. We must find a fix to the federal procurement process that spares the government’s technology projects from the self-inflicted wounds of signing big contracts whose terms repeatedly and spectacularly go unmet.

The good news is that these problems are not unique to the United States government, and others already have solutions. In 2011, the British government formed a new unit of its Cabinet Office called the Government Digital Service. It’s a team of internal technologists whose job it is to either build the right technology, or find the right vendors for every need across the government. It gives the government a technical brain. It has saved the country millions, and improved the way the government delivers services online.

The United States has taken a step in this direction. Last year, the government’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, started the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and brought together innovators from across the country to work on hard technical problems inside of government. But we need to create our own Government Digital Service.

The president should use the power of the White House to end all large information technology purchases, and instead give his administration’s accomplished technologists the ability to work with agencies to make the right decisions, increase adoption of modern, incremental software development practices, like a popular one called Agile, already used in the private sector, and work with the Small Business Administration and the General Services Administration to make it easy for small businesses to contract with the government.

Large federal information technology purchases have to end. Any methodology with a 94 percent chance of failure or delay, which costs taxpayers billions of dollars, doesn’t belong in a 21st-century government.

Clay Johnson, a former Presidential Innovation Fellow and lead programmer for Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, is the chief executive officer of the Department of Better Technology, a nonprofit that develops technology for governments. Harper Reed is the former chief technology officer of Obama for America.