[iyulaev]

Why don't we take the brilliant hackers and programmers at the NSA and task them to fix and re-build the ACA exchange system?

Building a database to track the communications of ever single person in the US and ever foreigner they talk to? Piece of cake.

Building a database to track the health insurance policies for a subset of Americans? Over budget, behind schedule, still doesn't really work yet.

Priorities.

[caryhartline]

Those are two things that don't have anything to do with each other. You seem to think that every single web service and database works the exact same way.

[andrewfong]

Not that I'd hire the NSA folks per se, but I'd imagine that the NSA's programmers are full time employees. One thing that might dramatically improve government IT in general is to shift more of it in-house rather than relying on contractors.

[bmelton]

Having actually worked with NSA programmers, I can tell you that while they tend to be absolutely brilliant, that doesn't necessarily make them any better at making things "easy to use", "intuitive" or even necessarily "good".

When it comes to algorithm design, reverse engineering, or crypto, I know exactly who to call when I need help. When it comes to a layout that works, or in many cases, even just coding up some fairly simple HTML with CSS, my NSA buddies aren't in the top 50 of people I'd call.

Yes, they're brilliant. The best of them though, produce websites (if they're capable of coding on the web) that look more like stallman.org than anything like healthcare.org.

[udit99]

I see your point, but the primary challenge of delivering large, complex software projects in a reasonable timeframe applies to both endeavours.

[monokrome]

They're too busy stealing your emails, man. They don't have time to spend helping anyone.

[jacalata]

What makes you think that was on time or in budget?

[hga]

We don't hear much about it, but the NSA has had some stunning IT failures. Development (heck, they can't open their Utah site because of severe, ruin $100K of hardware each time, power glitches), something major above their collection system(s) failed hard once for more than a few days ... and since they're the No Such Agency, we only hear about some of the very worst ones, I'm sure.

Flip side is, doing this in the black budget does allow them to avoid some of the usual government contracting insanities. While that's no gaurentee of success, e.g. look at the NRO's recent expensive stumbles, from the dozen years I spent Inside the Beltway I've gotten a strong impression the intelligence community does a generally much better job than run of the mill open Federal IT.