RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama is now claiming ignorance of the flaws in the Healthcare.gov website.  This is what he said on Thursday:

“I was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to. I’m accused of a lot of things. I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity a week before the website opens if I thought that it wasn’t going to work,” Mr. Obama said during a press conference at the White House. “Clearly we, and I, did not have enough awareness about the problems with the website.”

Okay  Mr. President,  let’s get a few things straight:

First of all, it was your job to know the status of the Healthcare.gov project.  You are the head of the executive branch—the CEO of the government.  It was a key piece of your signature legislation and a huge, expensive project by any standard.

It is also  a matter of record that numerous parties attempted to tell you where you were going wrong.  You received several personal letters from David Cutler, a supporter of Obamacare and a health policy expert, explaining the problems plaguing your team and your handling of the law in general.  You ignored him.

Your health care adviser, Zeke Emanuel,  advised you to hire a proper engineering manager to oversee the development of this massive technical project.  Your team of economic advisers gave you that advice as well.  You chose to ignore them and appointed a policy wonk to that position. But I forgot—you’ve said in the past that you are a better speechwriter than your speechwriters, and you know more about policies on any particular issue than your policy directors.  So it makes sense that you would ignore the advice of the people you hired to advise you.  You are a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Your appointee to lead the effort was smarter than you;  she knew she was in over her head and  attempted to find a proper engineering manager. She failed.  I’m guessing this was because any competent professional who looked at the requirements, the timeline, and the behavior of your administration chose to run for the hills instead.

After she left the job, you learned nothing and appointed another liberal policy wonk to take her place. You were warned again by Mr. Cutler that you had chosen the wrong kind of person for the job, but you refused to budge.

In the months and years leading up to the release of the web site, your  White House was repeatedly visited by executives from various insurance companies and by the contractors trying to build your web site. They all warned of problems, and begged you to release key technical documents to their teams. You did nothing.  You were informed that a killer of engineering projects like this is the addition of new requirements late in the process. Your response? Your administration  chose to withhold key requirements and documents from the engineers until after the election, then, for political reasons, added a huge new requirement near the end of an already failing project.

When people with engineering expertise told you that the schedule was unrealistic and couldn’t be achieved, the White House response was a lame, “It is what it is.  Just get it done.”  This is never an appropriate response to a serious concern by a project team. But since you’ve never been within shouting distance of people doing real work, how could you be expected to know that?

Since you’ve never had any executive experience, let me explain it to you: The CEO’s job is not to dictate and demand the unreasonable. The CEO’s job is to facilitate progress and to help break administrative and communication logjams slowing down the team. The CEO’s job is also to make sure that there are mitigation strategies in place when things go into the weeds and to stay on top of key projects.  You’re supposed to be the ultimate ‘go to’ guy when things get rocky – not a dictator who issues decrees from on high and then goes golfing while the underlings squabble amongst themselves.    CEOs who behave like you do usually cause havoc in an organization until they’re removed.

When it became abundantly clear even to your White House that the project could not possibly be completed in time,  your first response was to hold to the unrealistic deadline by shortening the required integration test period to a couple of weeks—an act that any competent project manager would consider negligent.  No engineer worth his degree would make that choice. No CEO with any experience or sense of ethics would ship an untested product against the pleas of his engineering team.

The stupidity continues.  The crush of the schedule left no time for critically important security testing and auditing. So how did your administration respond to that?  You granted yourselves a waiver, despite being told that there were known high risk security issues with the system. But hey, it’s only connecting to many different federal and state databases containing the sensitive personal information of millions of Americans. What could possibly go wrong?

This is the kind of behavior that causes space shuttles to explode while engineers are screaming about the risk. It’s the kind of behavior that, had it occurred in the private sector, would open up a company to civil lawsuits and fines. It’s the kind of behavior that, had it occurred in the private sector,  Barack Obama would be using as an example of why governments must regulate and control everything.

It’s also the kind of behavior that leaves millions of formerly-insured Americans stranded without health insurance.

On August 17, you received this status report (PDF) from CGI, one of your main contractors. The status report shows that the project was only 66% complete a month and a half before going live.    Did you honestly think that a system 66% complete after years of development would magically be completed in a month and a half? Or is your staff so incompetent that, after receiving an e-mail describing an obvious upcoming disaster that could destroy your signature legislative achievement, they decided you didn’t need to know about it? When you were giving speeches saying that the project was on track and was going to be marvelous, did none of your staff think to tell you what was really going on, so you wouldn’t embarrass yourself in public?  If not, why do they still have jobs?

On September 5, , a mere three weeks before the website would be released to the public,  a final acceptance demonstration was scheduled for your approval. You were to be given a demonstration of the system to show that it was working and ready to go. Looking at this document, it appears that what you were shown was a mockup done in Adobe Captivate.   Really? If that’s correct, did you think that you were looking at the real thing? Or if you knew it it was a mockup,  did you not wonder why you needed to be shown a mockup of a system that should have been  finished and undergoing final tests by that point?

Two weeks before going live, your team finally got around to doing a ‘load test’ on the system—a test that should have happened months sooner, while there was still time to fix the problems it would inevitably uncover. The system crashed with just a few hundred users on it.

You knew you were going to get hundreds of thousands of people hitting the site after it went live.  On what planet does this not ring alarm bells all through the White House? I honestly don’t understand the logic here. Did you really think it was a better idea to launch the site and let it crash spectacularly in public than to take a smaller hit and announce a delay at a press conference? Or did you think someone would sprinkle magic hope and change dust on the computer systems and they would just spring to life and heal themselves of bugs?   Perhaps you thought they would work anyway because you’re the one they’d been waiting for.

If you didn’t know about any of this, what kind of ship are you running? How can you possibly have an organization so inept that no one on your staff would think to inform you of such basic and critical information? Or perhaps you are such a terrible boss that you’ve been cut out of the loop because you’re a net liability to the process.

At the end of this tragic series of stupid mistakes,  you managed to do something so spectacularly stupid it boggles the mind. And this was not an engineering mistake—it was a political error.  That’s supposed to be in your wheelhouse, and you blew it anyway.

Let’s re-create the scene: A month before the critical roll-out date of a web site that absolutely had to work right, you had a staff of terrified people frantically making rash decisions to risk security leaks and outright crashes.  You had engineering teams warning of risks that would ‘almost certainly’ cause severe problems.   You had a system that was crashing when only a tiny fraction of the expected load hit it.   You or your team absolutely knew that you were weeks away from a terrible disaster.

And just as all seemed lost, here came the Republicans, threatening to shut down the government unless you agreed to do the very thing you desperately needed to do—delay the whole thing so you could get your act together.  It was a gift from heaven itself.

If you actually were smart, you could have hung the delay around the Republican’s necks, and they would have taken the blame for all those insurance cancellations you knew had to be coming. You could have gone in front of the American people and said, “I’m sorry for all of you who lost insurance. We would have replaced those plans with better ones, but the  Republicans stopped us. It’s on them.”

You could have  extracted other concessions from the Republicans in exchange for agreeing to delay the thing that couldn’t possibly work anyway and built yourself a mountain of political capital by being the one who was ‘reasonable’. You could have thrown your magnanimity in the Republican’s faces for the next three years.  No one would have known about your numerous failures of leadership and management.

But no, you decided to let the government shut down anyway,  just so you could stick to the schedule you had absolutely no chance to meet. You chose to expose your own failures rather than make a deal that would have saved your presidency.

Now that’s stupid.