Terminal idiots: nobody's dumber at buying computers than Uncle Sam

Washington Monthly, June, 1993 by Frank Greve

Other federal computer follies are so dumb they're tragicomic:

* Air Force systems engineers spent $1.6 billion to modernize the attack warning center at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, without ever determining whether adequate electrical power is available for the new computers. It isn't--no small problem for a complex required to be self-sufficient in wartime.

* The Veterans Benefit Administration, concerned that it took an average of 151 days to decide whether a veteran was disabled, spent $94 million on new computers to speed up claims. Now it takes 140 days.

* The Farmers Home Administration invested $500 million in computers five years ago to manage mortgage loans at the county level. But local officials still use color-coded paper files because the Agriculture Department has yet to devise functional software.

* The National Institutes of Health spent $200 million on a mainframe system to assist researchers pushing the frontiers of biomedical research." Small problem: "We're not using it," says biologist Alasdair Steven. Researchers prefer personal computers.

* Defense Department doctors didn't have much say in a $500 million system to computerize care records for their 2 million patients. Now hospital doctors refuse to use what one Walter Reed physician described in recent E-mail as "a monstrous mish-mash of second-rate, poorly designed programs."

Rotten apples

Who's making these dumb decisions? Often someone who's no longer around. If procurements take four years, there's a high mathematical probability that the person who put in the order is long gone when the full scope of the disaster becomes clear. Moreover, because service and even hardware contracts are regularly recomputed, the company that provided the machines and programmed the system may not be around either.

The result is often a mess: an IBM mainframe, an Amdahl front end processor, storage from Storage Tech, a network courtesy of AT&T, and user terminals provided by Sun. "If something goes wrong, you've got to wonder whether it's the Sun platform, the Amdahl front end, the IBM mainframe . . . . Servicing becomes a very complex problem," says Treasury's Broadbent.

At one time, federal managers didn't really shop for their computers; they simply and reflexively bought IBM. The practice so offended House Government Operations Committee chairman Jack Brooks, a Texas Democrat, that he used the 1984 Competition in Contracting Act to open up the computer markets. Among the measures is a special General Services Board of Contract Appeals that has decided in favor of bid protesters in more than a third of all challenges brought in recent years. Not surprisingly, this sympathetic court has brought out the caution in bureaucrats and the litigiousness in losing bidders, and it is widely blamed for slowing computer acquisitions.

The jobs for which Washington needs computers are already convoluted. Programming the tax system of tomorrow, for instance, will take an estimated 2 million lines of flawless programming compared to the 40,000 it takes IBM to handle its payroll. "It's a mass delusion for us to pretend we know how to build the enormous systems we need," says Rona Stillman, chief computer scientist for the GAO. "When we've tried to, they've almost universally been failures."