I was intimately familiar with the period in time during which Booze Allen won the Rec.gov contract. (My company was a founding member of AccessLand.org, a coalition of non-profit and for-profit orgs pushing for open data reform for America’s parks.) As much as I want to dunk on BAH for their spook work, and more broadly opine on the the parasitical undermining of government by corporate lobbyists, it is important to give credit where it is due and recognize the overall-great work that BAH did on the rec.gov contract.
People forget that before BAH, Reserve America (owned by IAC) used to have the federal and California contracts. RA delivered a terrible experience, never innovated or iterated, did the least amount of work possible, stripped their own internal team down to a skeleton crew in order to juice profits, and maximally leveraged their incumbency. What was supposed to be a 5 year contract turned into a 10 year contract, and then they leached out further profits by holding the transfer to BAH off for years through legal shenanigans. The RA team were transparently unethical, and in private meetings would say things that you might expect from a government contractor who truly thinks they have monopoly status and cannot be displaced. They did not have the user’s best interest at heart.
Schadenfreude is generally distasteful, but I’m not above saying how pleased I was to see Reserve America lose the federal and California contracts.
By contrast, my experience with the BAH team was that they brought “best-practices” to the table (they ran agile sprints, for starters), openly dialogued with community members to seek feedback on how best to improve Rec.gov, and had recruited an internal team that obviously cared about building a great experience for the parks, and for the government generally. BAH were not actively hostile to open data ideals — unlike other bidders, including RA — and seemed to have a more inclusive attitude to how government can be transformed through APIs and open data, whereby the gov’t contractor would build and maintain the core infrastructure, but 3rd parties could compete to provide better services to the public. In short, BAH operated in a good faith attitude and generally succeeded in building a good experience for users. As many comments here reflect, Rec.gov stands unique among many government websites and services as a pretty solid experience.
On the downside: BAH has failed to provide full open-data access to 3rd parties. There is still no place online that a developer can register an API key and check availability data (an outstanding requirement of the RFP contract) — some 3rd parties do have access to this data, but by failing to make availability data publicly and easily accessible, innovation here has been stymied. Conversations with 3rd parties to design and negotiate a 3rd party bookings API have also not materialized, as they said they would in good faith. These shortcomings are frustrating, and represent missed opportunities for BAH to continue building upon their infrastructure in providing a template for Govt services, and turning around their brand.
By contrast, Xerox won the California contract; an unusable abomination of contractor hack work. I did not think it was possible to do worse than RA, but they have somehow managed it. I suspect, however, that this is largely through incompetence rather than malice on their part. Unfortunately, without a full availability and bookings API, no 3rd parties can improve the experience either so we’re stuck with reservecalifornia.com for the interminable future.
As much as I want to bag on the profit motive behind BAH, this OP article is missing some historical nuance about how bad things were, and could still be.