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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

National Public Radio had a good report on 8 October 2013, "Health Exchange Tech Problems Point To A Thornier Issue,"

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424...

that discusses the broader issue of United States federal government contracting for information technology services. Some reforms are suggested in that story that would help more competent startup companies compete against the established federal contractors that win most of the big contracts. The specialized skill that the incumbents bring to the contracting process is not specialized skill in data-processing or programming for federal agencies, but rather specialized skill in navigating the federal bureaucracy for bidding on federal contracts.

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I don't understand why the IRS model isn't used more widely. Imagine if the Feds just maintained a backend server, with a published API, and paid $X/completed application.

I'm not sure what hoops the tax processing sites have to go through, but people are at least as protective of that data as their medical records.

The difference between established federal contractors and startups disappears if startups get federal contracts. I know a lot of startups would like a better shot at that cash, but if the problem is in the incentives then it's no help to get different people doing the same things.

If there are already problems with how federal contracts are awarded, it is hard to imagine that wholesale deregulation is going to result in a more selective process. For example, blind removal of lowest-bidder requirements would make larger-scale corruption even easier.

There are legitimate complaints and federal contracting needs work, but what kind of work? Let's not underestimate how much worse we can make it. The money on the table is ample incentive for people to propose innocent-sounding reforms which really just open up the taps or redirect them to different parties rather than increasing efficiency.

Having a scoring system that takes in to account how many previous govt projects have gone over budget and over time would help. Yes, small company X might not have a track record, and might end up folding in 2 years (especially if they can't get decent sized contracts to stay in business), but is that necessarily any worse than bigcoXYZ getting contract, then taking 3 years longer than proposed and going 400% over budget?

Look at the track record of the company, and use that in factoring in contract awards. Companies that routinely go over budget and over time should be penalized by having a reduced chance of getting contracts in the first place. That's one thing that would help level the playing field a bit.

Of course, what would happen is those larger companies would create related spin-offs that are technically not related, and they'd have 'fresh' stats to compete with, and the cycle would start over again, probably.

I wonder if there's an idea for a startup for startups here:

Navigating Govermental Bureaucratic Morass as a Service

It's not exactly what you're describing, but RFP-EZ isn't far off: http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/rfp-ez

Their website is now apparently in open beta: https://rfpez.sba.gov/

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