 I want to get to this issue of exactly who is in charge of this project, because you're now blaming it on the contractors and saying it's Verizon's fault. So who is responsible for overseeing this project? We are, we own the site. The site has had serious problems. Who is in charge, Madam Secretary? The person now in charge as an integrator is QSSI, one of our... Who was in charge as it was being built? Who was in charge up till... At that team, who is the individual? Michelle Snyder is the... Michelle Snyder is the one responsible for this debacle. Well, excuse me, Congresswoman, Michelle Snyder is not responsible for the debacle. Hold me accountable for the debacle. I'm responsible. Thank you, I yield back. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act came into effect in 2010, and now every American is required to have health insurance. The government set up a website that was supposed to be the easiest way for everyone to shop and get enrolled, and that was healthcare.gov, which is arguably the largest consumer-facing web app the government has ever built. I'm covered. We're covered. Now we're covered. Enroll now at the Health Insurance Marketplace at healthcare.gov. And on the first day, October 1st, 2013, it didn't work. Today was the first opportunity for millions of Americans to go to these new exchanges and sign up for insurance under Obamacare, and it turned out so many people tried to do that, computers crashed. You've probably heard that healthcare.gov hasn't worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work. There were major problems all over the country. Websites were slow or crashed altogether, leaving a lot of folks angry and frustrated. Healthcare.gov, as the website is known, got some serious glitches into its system yesterday. There's going to be a lot of evaluation of how we got to this point. Healthcare.gov has been called disappointing, frustrating, a fiasco, and a debacle. In a time when most people are used to using lots of websites that are well-designed and pretty much work well all the time, the terribleness of healthcare.gov is frankly scary, especially when you consider that the government is only going to have to build more websites, not fewer. Now everyone from the president to his Republican critics to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are talking about what's wrong with the federal IT process and how do we fix it. I think if you look at this from a long-term perspective, we're in a really dangerous spot when it comes to government. Think about Moore's Law. Moore's Law says that technology gets twice as good or half as expensive every 18 months. That's an exponential law. There's a curve, the sort of quintessential hockey stick curve. The problem is that government has an efficiency problem when it comes to acquiring technology. It's sort of behind that curve. As we progress through technology's growth, that gap between what government has access to and what the public has access to is growing further and further and further apart. I don't care whether you're a Democrat or a Republican or a conservative, a socialist, a libertarian, whatever you want to call yourself. I think what you want is for your government to be able to operate well. The problem is that if the gap between the public sector and the private sector grows too wide, then government's not able to provide services to the public well. Or it has to spend an enormous amount of cost to try and keep up with the private sector's expectations. And I think that's really dangerous long term for the health of the country. There is a larger problem that I probably could have identified earlier, and that is the way the federal government does procurement and does IT is just generally not very efficient. I think it's fair to say that we have a pretty good track record of working with folks on technology and IT from our campaign. Both in 2008 and 2012, we did a pretty darn good job on that. On my campaign, I could simply say, who are the best folks out there? Let's get them around a table. Let's figure out what we're doing, and we're just going to continue to improve it and refine it and work on our goals. If you're doing it at the federal government level, you're going through 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other, and there are all kinds of laws involved. Right now, the procurement process basically says that you have to buy a website like you buy a battleship. How many different companies ended up working on the final product? The contract that CMS ended up using to fulfill most of this work had 16 contractors on it. And if you go through and look at all of their subcontractors, there's at least a dozen more. It was basically everyone you would expect in terms of big government contracting players. So a bunch of these technology contractors and contractors who just kind of do everything. So you'll see them contracting for pretty much every agency. Oftentimes you see things like healthcare.gov pop up where you have subpar vendors who have subpar talent working on projects because they don't have to compete and regulation prevents them from hiring some of the best talent to work on this stuff. Building a website for the government isn't as simple as building one for, say, a startup. Not only are there rules such as the federal acquisition regulations that limit how the government can buy things, but there are many archaic regulations you have to navigate as well like relatively low salary caps for employees of government contractors and onerous laws like the Paperwork Reduction Act. For every information collection that the federal government puts out, they have to put that information out to public comment before that information collection can sort of be put out. This is like a wording of every question that the government asks. In 2009, the president tried to tweet a question to the public and was prohibited from doing so because that would have been considered an information collection. Now those rules have since changed a bit so the president can now end a tweet and a question mark, but it's still a preposterous law and a preposterous amount of legislation that really prohibits, you know, if you're a web designer, half of what you're doing with web design is making forms and those all require these arduous public notice processes that don't make any sense. The contractors that built healthcare.gov, all large beltway insiders like CGI Federal and Lockheed Martin, were actually selected years before the Affordable Care Act passed, before anybody knew we'd be building a health insurance exchange. That's because the government likes to buy things using broad indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity or IDIQ contracts that can cover all an agency's projects for up to 10 years. This speeds things up a bit, but it's not the way any technologist would decide who should build a website. Technology evolves quickly and critics say these long term contracts ensure the government gets left behind. I think that just encourages entrenchment and it makes them less likely to embrace some other concepts that are fundamental to technology, so iterating quickly. And you know, a popular one among startups is failing hard and fast. So the idea is to fail before you scale so large that you affect that many people. I think in a time right now, I guess we're like in the age of the internet where technology is changing by the month, that that's totally inappropriate. The exchange is comprised of six complex systems and involves 55 contractors, including CGI Federal, five government agencies, 36 states and more than 300 insurers with more than 4,500 insurance plans, all coming together in healthcare.gov. Right now there's no central technology authority inside of the Federal Government. That doesn't exist. There's nobody who can say, hey, you know, except for the president, I guess, could probably get on the phone with Secretary Sebelius and say, hey, fix healthcare.gov. I'm pretty sure that conversation's already happened. But for the most part, the staff of the White House can't just sort of tromp over to an agency and say, hey, you do this. That's not the way the government works. The insurance marketplace at healthcare.gov is a keystone of the Affordable Care Act. It's supposed to allow anyone to shop and compare plans from different insurance companies, guaranteeing the best rate, and then actually purchase that insurance for themselves and their families. Now, the law's opponents are trying to use the busted website as an argument to repeal the entire law. For want of a website, healthcare reform could be lost. Anything that the Federal Government does usually ends up being too expensive to afford. And that certainly is what we have seen with the website. But unfortunately, what our constituents are beginning to realize is going to transpire with their healthcare. What do you think is the fix at this point? There's only one fix for Obamacare. You've got to repeal it. This is never going to, I mean, it's, that's the only fix. We tried to delay it. We had a big fight about it. Now people know why we fought so hard. I mean, see how bad it is when they see what's, the notices they're getting, your policy's being dropped, the increase in premiums, you're not going to be able to keep your own doctor, the website doesn't work, you can't compare prices. Now they know why we fought so hard. The only answer is to repeal this. The President had to apologize for a website in the Rose Garden? Like, you know, that's never happened before. This is a significant moment for information technology and government. But that doesn't have anything to do with the Affordable Care Act other than this was the vessel, you know, for the Affordable Care Act's implementation. That law has been passed. I don't think that because the website broke it nullifies the spirit of the law or the intent behind it. I think that it is indicative not of repealing the Affordable Care Act but fixing the procurement policies and regulations that caused this failure to happen. Because they will happen again and again and again. There's probably no bigger gap between the private sector and the public sector than IT. And we've seen that in, for example, the VA and the Department of Defense trying to deal with electronic medical records for our servicemen as they move into civilian life. We've now had about a decade of experimentation, spent billions of dollars and it's still not working the way it should. So what we probably needed to do on the front end was to blow up how we procure for IT. HealthCare.gov has become more stable since its launch, but its failure highlighted a bigger problem. The administration failed to bring the same technology literacy that helped Obama get elected with them into the White House, missing an opportunity to reform outdated policies and set up the federal government for success. Pretend America is a car and it's sputtering down the road. It's a big car and we're having a debate in Congress about how we can make that car go faster. What the Democrats say is in order to make the car go faster what we have to do is put more gasoline in the engine. What the Republicans say is no, what we need to do is throw half of the cargo out the back of the car. What I'm trying to say is none of you guys are paying attention to the fact that we have a one mile per gallon engine and maybe the gains to be realized aren't in cutting spending or increasing taxes, but increasing the efficiency of the way that we spend the money. This idea of how government uses technology isn't like a backroom issue that's for the management longs, it's something that we've all got to care about. We care about global warming and climate change and we care about the deficit and the budget. Think about what good it would do if the government was spending its money not on 16 giant contractors, CGI Federal is a Canadian company, but on small, our own small homegrown technology businesses that have been so innovative and smart in the past at delivering services to us.
 I want to get to this issue of exactly who is in charge of this project, because you're
 now blaming it on the contractors and saying it's Verizon's fault.
 So who is responsible for overseeing this project?
 We are, we own the site.
 The site has had serious problems.
 Who is in charge, Madam Secretary?
 The person now in charge as an integrator is QSSI, one of our...
 Who was in charge as it was being built?
 Who was in charge up till...
 At that team, who is the individual?
 Michelle Snyder is the...
 Michelle Snyder is the one responsible for this debacle.
 Well, excuse me, Congresswoman, Michelle Snyder is not responsible for the debacle.
 Hold me accountable for the debacle.
 I'm responsible.
 Thank you, I yield back.
 The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act came into effect in 2010, and now every
 American is required to have health insurance.
 The government set up a website that was supposed to be the easiest way for everyone to shop
 and get enrolled, and that was healthcare.gov, which is arguably the largest consumer-facing
 web app the government has ever built.
 I'm covered.
 We're covered.
 Now we're covered.
 Enroll now at the Health Insurance Marketplace at healthcare.gov.
 And on the first day, October 1st, 2013, it didn't work.
 Today was the first opportunity for millions of Americans to go to these new exchanges
 and sign up for insurance under Obamacare, and it turned out so many people tried to
 do that, computers crashed.
 You've probably heard that healthcare.gov hasn't worked as smoothly as it was supposed
 to work.
 There were major problems all over the country.
 Websites were slow or crashed altogether, leaving a lot of folks angry and frustrated.
 Healthcare.gov, as the website is known, got some serious glitches into its system yesterday.
 There's going to be a lot of evaluation of how we got to this point.
 Healthcare.gov has been called disappointing, frustrating, a fiasco, and a debacle.
 In a time when most people are used to using lots of websites that are well-designed and
 pretty much work well all the time, the terribleness of healthcare.gov is frankly scary, especially
 when you consider that the government is only going to have to build more websites, not
 fewer.
 Now everyone from the president to his Republican critics to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are
 talking about what's wrong with the federal IT process and how do we fix it.
 I think if you look at this from a long-term perspective, we're in a really dangerous spot
 when it comes to government.
 Think about Moore's Law.
 Moore's Law says that technology gets twice as good or half as expensive every 18 months.
 That's an exponential law.
 There's a curve, the sort of quintessential hockey stick curve.
 The problem is that government has an efficiency problem when it comes to acquiring technology.
 It's sort of behind that curve.
 As we progress through technology's growth, that gap between what government has access
 to and what the public has access to is growing further and further and further apart.
 I don't care whether you're a Democrat or a Republican or a conservative, a socialist,
 a libertarian, whatever you want to call yourself.
 I think what you want is for your government to be able to operate well.
 The problem is that if the gap between the public sector and the private sector grows
 too wide, then government's not able to provide services to the public well.
 Or it has to spend an enormous amount of cost to try and keep up with the private sector's
 expectations.
 And I think that's really dangerous long term for the health of the country.
 There is a larger problem that I probably could have identified earlier, and that is
 the way the federal government does procurement and does IT is just generally not very efficient.
 I think it's fair to say that we have a pretty good track record of working with folks on
 technology and IT from our campaign.
 Both in 2008 and 2012, we did a pretty darn good job on that.
 On my campaign, I could simply say, who are the best folks out there?
 Let's get them around a table.
 Let's figure out what we're doing, and we're just going to continue to improve it and refine
 it and work on our goals.
 If you're doing it at the federal government level, you're going through 40 pages of specs
 and this and that and the other, and there are all kinds of laws involved.
 Right now, the procurement process basically says that you have to buy a website like you
 buy a battleship.
 How many different companies ended up working on the final product?
 The contract that CMS ended up using to fulfill most of this work had 16 contractors on it.
 And if you go through and look at all of their subcontractors, there's at least a dozen more.
 It was basically everyone you would expect in terms of big government contracting players.
 So a bunch of these technology contractors and contractors who just kind of do everything.
 So you'll see them contracting for pretty much every agency.
 Oftentimes you see things like healthcare.gov pop up where you have subpar vendors who have
 subpar talent working on projects because they don't have to compete and regulation
 prevents them from hiring some of the best talent to work on this stuff.
 Building a website for the government isn't as simple as building one for, say, a startup.
 Not only are there rules such as the federal acquisition regulations that limit how the
 government can buy things, but there are many archaic regulations you have to navigate as
 well like relatively low salary caps for employees of government contractors and onerous laws
 like the Paperwork Reduction Act.
 For every information collection that the federal government puts out, they have to
 put that information out to public comment before that information collection can sort
 of be put out.
 This is like a wording of every question that the government asks.
 In 2009, the president tried to tweet a question to the public and was prohibited from doing
 so because that would have been considered an information collection.
 Now those rules have since changed a bit so the president can now end a tweet and a question
 mark, but it's still a preposterous law and a preposterous amount of legislation that
 really prohibits, you know, if you're a web designer, half of what you're doing with web
 design is making forms and those all require these arduous public notice processes that
 don't make any sense.
 The contractors that built healthcare.gov, all large beltway insiders like CGI Federal
 and Lockheed Martin, were actually selected years before the Affordable Care Act passed,
 before anybody knew we'd be building a health insurance exchange.
 That's because the government likes to buy things using broad indefinite delivery, indefinite
 quantity or IDIQ contracts that can cover all an agency's projects for up to 10 years.
 This speeds things up a bit, but it's not the way any technologist would decide who
 should build a website.
 Technology evolves quickly and critics say these long term contracts ensure the government
 gets left behind.
 I think that just encourages entrenchment and it makes them less likely to embrace some
 other concepts that are fundamental to technology, so iterating quickly.
 And you know, a popular one among startups is failing hard and fast.
 So the idea is to fail before you scale so large that you affect that many people.
 I think in a time right now, I guess we're like in the age of the internet where technology
 is changing by the month, that that's totally inappropriate.
 The exchange is comprised of six complex systems and involves 55 contractors, including CGI
 Federal, five government agencies, 36 states and more than 300 insurers with more than
 4,500 insurance plans, all coming together in healthcare.gov.
 Right now there's no central technology authority inside of the Federal Government.
 That doesn't exist.
 There's nobody who can say, hey, you know, except for the president, I guess, could probably
 get on the phone with Secretary Sebelius and say, hey, fix healthcare.gov.
 I'm pretty sure that conversation's already happened.
 But for the most part, the staff of the White House can't just sort of tromp over to an
 agency and say, hey, you do this.
 That's not the way the government works.
 The insurance marketplace at healthcare.gov is a keystone of the Affordable Care Act.
 It's supposed to allow anyone to shop and compare plans from different insurance companies,
 guaranteeing the best rate, and then actually purchase that insurance for themselves and
 their families.
 Now, the law's opponents are trying to use the busted website as an argument to repeal
 the entire law.
 For want of a website, healthcare reform could be lost.
 Anything that the Federal Government does usually ends up being too expensive to afford.
 And that certainly is what we have seen with the website.
 But unfortunately, what our constituents are beginning to realize is going to transpire
 with their healthcare.
 What do you think is the fix at this point?
 There's only one fix for Obamacare.
 You've got to repeal it.
 This is never going to, I mean, it's, that's the only fix.
 We tried to delay it.
 We had a big fight about it.
 Now people know why we fought so hard.
 I mean, see how bad it is when they see what's, the notices they're getting, your policy's
 being dropped, the increase in premiums, you're not going to be able to keep your own doctor,
 the website doesn't work, you can't compare prices.
 Now they know why we fought so hard.
 The only answer is to repeal this.
 The President had to apologize for a website in the Rose Garden?
 Like, you know, that's never happened before.
 This is a significant moment for information technology and government.
 But that doesn't have anything to do with the Affordable Care Act other than this was
 the vessel, you know, for the Affordable Care Act's implementation.
 That law has been passed.
 I don't think that because the website broke it nullifies the spirit of the law or the
 intent behind it.
 I think that it is indicative not of repealing the Affordable Care Act but fixing the procurement
 policies and regulations that caused this failure to happen.
 Because they will happen again and again and again.
 There's probably no bigger gap between the private sector and the public sector than
 IT.
 And we've seen that in, for example, the VA and the Department of Defense trying to deal
 with electronic medical records for our servicemen as they move into civilian life.
 We've now had about a decade of experimentation, spent billions of dollars and it's still not
 working the way it should.
 So what we probably needed to do on the front end was to blow up how we procure for IT.
 HealthCare.gov has become more stable since its launch, but its failure highlighted a
 bigger problem.
 The administration failed to bring the same technology literacy that helped Obama get
 elected with them into the White House, missing an opportunity to reform outdated policies
 and set up the federal government for success.
 Pretend America is a car and it's sputtering down the road.
 It's a big car and we're having a debate in Congress about how we can make that car go
 faster.
 What the Democrats say is in order to make the car go faster what we have to do is put
 more gasoline in the engine.
 What the Republicans say is no, what we need to do is throw half of the cargo out the back
 of the car.
 What I'm trying to say is none of you guys are paying attention to the fact that we have
 a one mile per gallon engine and maybe the gains to be realized aren't in cutting spending
 or increasing taxes, but increasing the efficiency of the way that we spend the money.
 This idea of how government uses technology isn't like a backroom issue that's for the
 management longs, it's something that we've all got to care about.
 We care about global warming and climate change and we care about the deficit and the budget.
 Think about what good it would do if the government was spending its money not on 16 giant contractors,
 CGI Federal is a Canadian company, but on small, our own small homegrown technology
 businesses that have been so innovative and smart in the past at delivering services to
 us.