Weekly Checkup

The Contractors that Couldn’t

On Tuesday, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released an overview of sixty contracts involved in the development and operation of the Federal Health Insurance Marketplace, which began with spectacular failure last fall. The Marketplace software was woefully unprepared for enrollment traffic at the time of launch, the website’s security was the subject of congressional hearings, and large portions of the data infrastructure remain incomplete. This OIG analysis of the contributing contracts, which covered a wide range of services and were originally estimated to cost $1.7 billion, is a small piece of a larger effort to understand what exactly went wrong. Below is a word cloud of the defined missions of each contract, perhaps elucidating the most simple question: what were they supposed to do? 

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