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

Washington Monthly, June, 1993 by Frank Greve

"If you're the IRS or Social Security or the Health Care Finance Administration, you can't let your old system go down for a minute," says Terry Miller, president of Government Sales Consultants of Great Falls, Virginia, specialists in government computer acquisitions. "You have to change engines on the train while it's going 50 miles an hour, pulling a thousand cars." Buying enormous systems for agencies that can't afford a moment's down time makes the government's purchases tricky enough. But a study of federal computer buyers compared to private sector buyers turned up one intriguing difference: Government buyers said they rarely considered a bidder's reputation and past performance. Private buyers relied heavily on those factors.

The reason, according to researcher Steven Kelman of Harvard's John E Kennedy School of Government, is that acquisition rules emphasize weighing factors in awarding contracts as objectively as possible. Since reputations are difficult to quantify, the government simply doesn't take them into account. "This is the greatest scandal in government computer procurement," says Kelman.

Even small agencies have tended to buy their own computers and custom software, resulting in terrific proliferation and bewildering variety. Today, Veterans Affairs offices run at least- 150 different computer systems. Justice has about as many. The Agency for International Development operates at least 75. HUD can only estimate its total.

The result is not simply chaos, but a frittering away of what computers are meant to do: help people think better, faster. The air, water, hazardous waste, and pesticide offices of the EPA, for example, all operate independent systems that measure pollutants differently. Thus it's quite impossible to say with certainty whether additional dollars to clean up pollution are best spent on Superfund or air pollution. The real waste from failing to integrate information is that we have less informed, less rational national policies," says Jay Etta Hecker, an EPA specialist at the GAO.

Mega bites

Recognizing the problem, many would--be big thinkers have tried to unify information systems by developing common definitions and data entry protocols. EPA officials, for example, decided in 1989 to give each of the nation's more than 600,000 polluting facilities a single EPA identification number. The idea was to make it easier for EPA employees and the public to track polluters and the EPA's actions against them. But nearly four years later, EPA officials still can't agree on the definition of "facility." Some insist it's a stack in the air; others, a pipe in the water. Some insist each building in a factory complex is a polluting facility; others say the whole complex counts as one. Classification is not a problem unique to the EPA. Efforts to develop a central computer record of all cases in litigation have been stymied at the Justice Department for 13 years. Justice's divisions can't quite agree on what constitutes a "case." The Agriculture Department can't define a farm. Making matters worse, the bureaucratic imperatives all favor thinking small and using eccentric computers to protect turf. According to a Senate aide who has studied government computer problems, "If you've got a unique computer system, it's like a firewall protecting your agency from outsiders, from reorganizations." In theory, every agency has an information resource manager who has the ear of the agency's top appointee, and in theory the General Services Administration (GSA) can delegate or withhold procurement authority from agencies. In theory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tests technologies and promotes compatibility. In practice, the GSA lacks the expertise and clout to resist what senior political appointees propose, and it has almost never done so. And NIST's federal computer bureau is tiny, academic, and generally uninvolved with questions about computer applications. It focuses solely on the most technical issues.