California’s $327 million web site in operation

688 Program Technician III... 88 Associate Gov. Program Analyst... 73 Office Assistant...

Numbers are FTE

To be fair to them, California's population is 38 million. Divide the budgets by that number to get a per-capita cost and it doesn't seem crazy to me.

As an aside the way we citizens run our government, budget bloat is guaranteed. We complain a little about bloat, but we complain a lot when things don't go perfectly, and we also go looking for individuals to blame. The strong incentive is to be very risk-averse. That's especially true in organizations, like government, where stability is prized and careers are long.

I really appreciate a lot of the work that government people do, but I would never put up with half the bullshit they do.

Well, $161m is more than 23% of $327m to start with.

The other thing is that although the government is using private contractors, that does not mean the latter are solely to blame. If the government ends up paying millions of dollars for a wordpress site sporting a $40 theme, the contractors charging for it may be immoral, but the government who awarded them the job is at best massively incompetent.

That's all true and the $327M price tag is misleading, but they still spent on the order of several million on the actual buildout of the website and fucked it up. It does not inspire confidence that the rest of the money was well spent.

> In other words, it looks like the software was mostly done by private contractors.

Wait a second. Government over-spending is beyond reproach when the money is channeled to what are likely politically-connected private firms? To my mind, that is equally egregious, perhaps even moreso because of the taint of cronyism (or still worse than that, regulatory capture by entrenched large firms).

But even if I give the firm-selection process the benefit of the doubt and assume it was done without kick-backs or regulatory capture effects of any sort (seems implausible, but we'll go with that), private firms simply know that when you are bidding on government work, the budget is enormous. You're probably likely to be kicked out of the running for being un-serious if your bid is significantly less than the average bid. And the average bid is high because ... government.

I can imagine feedback of the flavor: "You think you can do this type of complex web application for a mere fifty million? Don't waste my time."

It's dumbfounding this is the top comment. If we can't be critical of government waste in this case, when can we be? It seems you don't even understand your policy opponents' position; overpaying contractors is one of the chief complaints!

Of course it was done by private contractors.

Oh yea - in India too.

Ummm, what were you expecting? He went to the site, entered some numbers, and thereby discovered the following:

...for $327 million the government purchased a computer program unable to determine that $80,000 is more than $15,856.

Is there some sophisticated interpretation that finds this not to be a risible failure? If so, you could have provided that, as it actually would have been responsive to TFA. Don't allow what TFA actually says to get in the way of a good pro-government bashing!

Initial reports were that insurance.gov got 1M uniques before 8AM on launch day. One can imagine that California's exchange site was also slammed.

I'm not going to argue that this project's budget wasn't bloated, but it's pretty naive to think that your average low-rent startup team could handle it any better. Doing tens of millions of uniques on launch day is a challenge for any team. Most commercial websites with that much traffic have technology budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more.

It's actually the opposite. All of the regulations preventing it from going to some guy's buddy mean that only bloated, f'd up bureaucracies can clear the hurdles to land the gig. And in the end, it still helps to have some buddies, of course.

Accenture seems to be the biggest contractor - http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2012/09/15/californias-st...

> we are experiencing higher than expected users.

Dammit, Californians, stop smoking all that pot so we can get to the obamacare website!

Probably not much actually. Google tells me that California's population is about 38 million people. So, on average, you get less than $10 per person as a one-time "credit" (or however you'd call this). Even if only 1% of people needed coverage, they could get $1,000 worth of coverage which doesn't take you very far.

I'm not saying that that budget is reasonable or unreasonable, but that puts the amount in perspective a little bit.

That was my conclusion too ;-) Why do we try so hard right?

Join the rat race. Just make sure to either of the following: black, women, veteran, disabled if you want to go out on your own. If not, just sub contract from a minority owned business.

Everyone's tax money goes to a select few who screwed the state over (or.. went through their loopholes successfully, however you want to look at it). None of that sounds like a good stimulus to me.

They don't need to. Their customers are unable to switch.