Author Topic: Obama inc. gave failed ObamaCare website company a sweetheart deal  (Read 584 times)

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Obama Inc. Gave Failed ObamaCare Website Company a Sweetheart Deal

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On October 14, 2013 @ 6:24 pm In The Point | 2 Comments




Questions were raised before why Obama Inc. suddenly began throwing so much money toward a Canadian company with a poor track record.


CGI Federal is a subsidiary of Montreal-based CGI Group. With offices in Fairfax, Va., the subsidiary has been a darling of the Obama administration, which since 2009 has bestowed it with $1.4 billion in federal contracts, according to USAspending.gov.

In comparison, in 2008, under President George W. Bush, CGI contracts totaled only $16.5 million for all federal departments and agencies.

It’s not like CGI Federal could be confused with a good company. There were plenty of warnings throughout the whole process that the whole thing was not going to work.

When Canadian officials in Ontario ran into the same problem with CGI… they fired it.


Canadian provincial health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obamacare health exchange websites, the Washington Examiner has learned.

CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was officially terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s flagship online medical registry.

Obama just kept throwing more taxpayer money at CGI. And the entire ObamaCare setup was reserved for only one company.


Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.

CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.

Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm.



CGI was a much smaller vendor when it was approved by HHS in 2007. With the approval, CGI became eligible for multiple awards without public notice and in circumvention of the normal competitive bidding procurement process.



There is no evidence CMS issued any public solicitation for the Obamacare website contract.

This smells bad. No, it outright stinks. And it merits a serious investigation. Why did Obama Inc. suddenly begin tossing a ton of work to CGI and practically reserve ObamaCare for them?


General Accountability Office acting counsel Linda H. Gibson noted that at the time CMS officials had only rated some of CGI’s previous services as “fair.”

But it sounds like their insider Obama contacts were more than unfair.

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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-inc-gave-failed-obamacare-website-company-a-sweetheart-deal/