In Tech Buying, U.S. Still Stuck in Last Century

But despite Mr. Obama’s promises in the last two months to “leap into the 21st century,” there is little evidence that the administration is moving quickly to pursue an overhaul of the current system in the coming year.

Outside experts, members of Congress, technology executives and former government officials say the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s website is the nearly inevitable result of a procurement process that stifles innovation and wastes taxpayer dollars. The Air Force last year scrapped a $1 billion supply management system. Officials abandoned a new F.B.I. system after spending $170 million on it. And a $438 million air traffic control systems update, a critical part of a $45 billion nationwide upgrade that is years behind schedule, is expected to go at least $270 million over budget.

Longstanding laws intended to prevent corruption and conflict of interest often saddle agencies with vendors selected by distant committees and contracts that stretch for years, even as technology changes rapidly. The rules frequently leave the government officials in charge of a project with little choice over their suppliers, little control over the project’s execution and almost no authority to terminate a contract that is failing.

“It may make sense if you are buying pencils or cleaning services,” said David Blumenthal, who during Mr. Obama’s first term led a federal office to promote the adoption of electronic health records. But it does not work “when you have these kinds of incredibly complex, data-driven, nationally important, performance-based procurements.”

The Standish Group, an information technology firm, deemed just 4.6 percent of large-scale government contracting projects executed in the past decade to be successful. More than half were “challenged,” and about 40 percent simply “failed.”

Multinational companies with large legal teams are often successful at winning years-long government contracts. But officials say technology innovation — particularly on web-based projects like the health care site — is often found in smaller firms, like many in Silicon Valley, that lack the size and the know-how to navigate the costly procurement maze.

“It’s a punishing and punitive environment to work in,” said Stan Z. Soloway, the chief executive of the Professional Services Council, a trade group, and a former Clinton administration official.

Officials said the administration was conducting a “review of options” for improving the government’s use of technology and was beginning to discuss the issue with stakeholders inside and outside government. But they declined to say whether Mr. Obama would call for changes in how Washington delivers technology projects during his State of the Union address early next year and whether the White House had any specific plan to make good on the president’s oft-stated interest in tackling the thorny, bureaucratic issue.

“This administration has made considerable progress in reforming federal I.T. management practices,” said Steven Posner, a spokesman for the White House budget office, citing new open-data and cloud-computing initiatives. “As the president made clear, significant challenges remain in the area of federal I.T., and we need to continue improving the way we deliver technology.”

In Mr. Obama’s first term, the administration pushed agencies to move away from expensive, dedicated hardware by adopting more flexible and cheaper Internet-based services when possible. Officials also began requiring agencies to replace proprietary data with modern open formats that can be easily understood by the public and the private sector.

But lawmakers and others said the Obama administration was doing too little to fix the fundamental problems, and they predicted that the issue would ultimately fall to Mr. Obama’s successor.

Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, said the budget office, formally known as the Office of Management and Budget, refused to back bipartisan legislation that would consolidate responsibility for technology projects in a single person at each agency and increase the transparency of government spending on technology.

“O.M.B. takes the position, as it usually does, that we don’t need legislation to address these issues,” said Mr. Connolly, who represents a Washington suburb with hundreds of federal technology contractors. “O.M.B. was really our biggest stumbling block. It was maddening.”

Disruptions: Disruptions: Stuck With a Carrier for the Long Haul

Andrew D. Brosig/The Daily Sentinel, via Associated Press Consumers cannot easily switch carriers and keep their actual phones.

If dating were like the cellphone industry, you would have to sign a contract when you entered a relationship stating that you would remain monogamous for two years, even if you wanted to break up. That’s what cellular carriers have pulled off by successfully lobbying for a recent government ruling that you cannot take the phone you paid for and switch to another provider.

It’s the latest reminder that owning a cellphone on one of the biggest United States providers can sometimes feel like an unhappy relationship. Time and again, in the minds of many customers, these companies take advantage of us and there isn’t much we can do about it.

Srinivasan Keshav, a professor at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, who studies mobile computing, has found that cell carriers make more than a 4,000 percent profit on text messages. Sending a megabyte of text messages over the cell network costs customers roughly $1,500. What does it cost carriers? Close to nothing, as texts piggyback on other data transfers, including voice calls. The carriers combined make billions of dollars a year in fees on texting alone.

Then there was AT&T’s decision in mid-2010 to kill unlimited data plans on smartphones for new customers. As Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote at the time, “AT&T prefers to make life harder for its customers, if that’s going to give it a little bit more money.” For those who kept their unlimited plans and use larger amounts of data, like me, AT&T sometimes slows the data connection on its network.

As my colleague David Pogue wrote in 2009, carriers force people to listen to a 15-second message with instructions on how to leave a voice mail message before they can actually leave one, and charge them for that time. Let’s be realistic, if you don’t know how to leave a message in 2013, you probably don’t know how to use a phone. Phone companies have also hidden some charges in our bills in the past, disguising them as government fees, even though the money went directly to the phone companies.

CTIA, the wireless industry trade group, defended the latest move by wireless companies, saying that prohibiting people from taking their phones with them, a practice known as unlocking, would help protect carriers’ investments in subsidizing new handsets, and ultimately benefit customers.

“What we’re trying to do is good for customers — it is just not immediately apparent to them yet,” said Jot Carpenter, CTIA’s vice president for government affairs. He said cell carriers were trying to solve two issues: stopping people from selling stolen unlocked cellphones and helping keep down the cost of handsets by ensuring that phones that have been subsidized by carriers return their investment.

But members of Congress, the Obama administration and the Federal Communications Commission see it differently. Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, introduced a bill this month to overturn the ban on letting customers unlock their phones. The White House has said it is “common sense” for people to be allowed to do so. Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C.’s chairman, said the ban “doesn’t pass the common-sense test.”

Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit company that focuses on information policy, compares the phone companies to airlines, which have reduced the cost of flights but now charge passengers to check bags, board early or eat a meal. “The difference, though, is that with airlines, once you are finished with that flight, you can choose to never fly with them again,” he said. “With phone companies, you’re locked in with a two-year contract.” Of course, there are other plans that don’t require a contract.

Consumers cannot easily fight these sleights of hand because in 2011 the Supreme Court said customers could no longer file class-action suits against their cellular carriers. Mr. Carpenter of CTIA said that if customers were unhappy, they could easily switch providers. “There’s a tremendous amount of choice and competition in the industry,” he said.

So will anything change? “The F.C.C. could push the industry to end a lot of these practices tomorrow,” Mr. Feld said.

Until then, consumers will have to decide whom they prefer for their monogamous but not always pleasant relationship.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com
Twitter: @nickbilton