Who Cares About "Past Performance"? Not Sebelius!

Six hundred million dollars into a rathole.

Reported by POGO:

Specifically, what CMS contracting officials overlooked and/or downplayed was that more than 100 of CGI’s employees came from Virginia-based IT company American Management Systems (AMS), which CGI acquired in 2004. According to the Post, AMS had mishandled at least 20 government IT projects, including one particularly well-publicized fiasco involving the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board’s $36 million overhaul of its recordkeeping system.

AMS’s questionable past performance on government contracts should have set off alarms in 2007, when CMS awarded CGI and 15 other companies an umbrella contract allowing them to bid on future CMS projects. In fact, a former CMS official told the Post that AMS’s track record “could well have knocked [CGI Federal] out of the competition, and probably should have.”

...the admission from those former CMS officials that the government shirks its regulatory duty to screen contractors really surprised us. The government should not have such a blasé attitude regarding the past performance of contractors to which it entrusts billions of dollars for projects and programs that are literally a matter of life and death. We hope the epic embarrassment of the HealthCare.gov rollout—and its troubling backstory—will do for federal contracting what the Edward Snowden revelations are doing for federal surveillance programs: spark a vigorous public debate and get the ball rolling on long-term fixes.

Don't hold your breath.  DC is irretrievably broken.