Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website?

MarkWhittington writes "Glenn Reynolds, the purveyor of Instapundit, asked the pertinent question, 'If big government can put a man on the moon, why can't it put up a simple website without messing it up?' The answer, as it turns out, is a rather simple one. The Apollo program, that President John F. Kennedy mandated to put a man on the moon and return him to the Earth, was a simple idea well carried out for a number of reasons. The primary one was that Congress did not pass a 1,800 or so page bill backed up by a mind-numbing amount of regulations mandating how NASA would do it. The question of how to conduct the lunar voyages was left up to the engineers at NASA and the aerospace industry at the time. The government simply provided the resources necessary to do the job and a certain degree of oversight. Imagine if President Obama had stated, 'I believe the nation should commit itself to the goal of enabling all Americans to access affordable health insurance' but then left the how to do it to some of the best experts in health care and economics without partisan interference."

Comments

Apollo 1? Apollo 13?

[sweatyboatman]

Our efforts to land on the moon didn't go smoothly. Also we spent a lot more money to go to the moon.

Apollo 1 was scheduled to be the first manned mission of the U.S. Apollo manned lunar landing program, with a target launch date of February 21, 1967. A cabin fire during a launch pad test on January 27 at Launch Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral killed all three crew members—Command Pilot Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White II and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee—and destroyed the Command Module (CM).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon... but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the Service Module (SM) upon which the Command Module (CM) depended. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13

Complex problems are complex.

Re: What ?

[drewsup]

Yup, just ask the UK how the NHS upgrade went, 16 Billion spent and then pulled the plug.

Gov. Purchasing is the Real Problem

[heavyion]

As a federal worker I can tell you that trying to buy something for government use is an extremely byzantine process. An example, if I need to buy a monitor cable, I have to fill out 3 forms (one of them is 14 pages), get four _independent_ approvals, quotes (yes... quotes for a monitor cable), and then follow the documents to make sure nothing gets messed-up along the way. I have to do this for _any_ piece of equipment that is in any way related to information technology. I don't want to describe the process for anything requiring a contract and I can't imagine the amount of work that went into writing the requirements document for a project involving 55 (55!) contracting agencies. The REAL PROBLEM here is the desperate need for contract and purchasing reform in the federal government.

Re:The answer is SIMPLE

[sycodon]

Lest you forget, Obamacare is a Democrat invention. Lock, Stock, and Barrel. They wrote it, they passed it, they implemented it.

Re:An open, transparent, bipartisan process ...

[Karl Cocknozzle]

If we had the open, transparent, and bipartisan (seats at the table for Republicans) process promised then things would have gone quite different.

Now who's being revisionist? We tried that: Every time the GOP was invited to participate they howled about death panels. Every time they were asked for an alternate plan they babbled incoherently about a "Free market system" without illuminating us as to how to implement such a thing in real life. I'm not sure how many opportunities they should have been extended.

It's easy to say they "should have been included," and, indeed, they should have been, but their non-involvement comes from their own choices, though. In effect they essentially eliminated themselves from the serious conversation by saying such radical and easily disproven nonsense, and are now whining about not being included even though they excluded themselves from the proceedings.

I count at least three, maybe four (depending on semantics) major pushes to get GOP support for this law. Two of them were the "Olympia Snowe-job" and the "Grassley Gambit," wherein the named senators entered (in bad faith) into talks about writing a healthcare reform law for the purpose of dragging out the proceedings even-longer-than-they'd-already-gone-on because they knew full-well they 1) Weren't going to vote for anything Obama supported and 2) They also knew the democrats were desperate to get even one Republican to sign-on and take part, and the democrats (somehow, despite being slapped in the face with evidence daily for months) still hadn't figured out that the GOP had no intention of "governing" by reforming healthcare, but every intention of "stymieing" Obama, whatever idea he brought to the table.

There was also the summit, where the GOP basically said "free-market, rah rah!" but didn't offer any plan. Hey, a free market is a lovely idea: How about some concrete suggestions on having it 1) Actually exist int he real world (i.e. "How to get there from here,") without 2) Taking us through a radical "shakeout" period where "the market" decides the best answer to the question "How much does life-saving treatment cost?" is "How much you got?" and 3) Do both #1 and #2 without locking out millions of poor people from access to care.

And, of course, the main evidence that suggests the GOP would have adamantly, vehemently opposed anything the President proposed is their own words, the day after the inauguration. They'd already decided on this course before there was an ACA--they already decided they would lock-step oppose anything the Obama administration tried to accomplish--short of him changing over to the GOP mid-term, anyway.