Kludgeocracy in America

The PPACA rollout has been termed a disaster (at least on the federal level). What went wrong? Both firms and governments find big software projects hard to manage. The federal procurement process is a mess. But perhaps the biggest problem is the level of complexity that American politics & law imposed on the project.
As Garance Franke-Ruta observes:

Obamacare was damaged at the outset by the political tug-of-war over its very existence, and the conflicts at its creation have had serious downstream effects, placing the federal government in charge of far more than it was supposed to be doing. It also has also suffered from what Johns Hopkins University political scientist Steven Teles calls “kludgeocracy”—the tendency of interest groups, lobbyists, bureaucracy, and bad management to combine to create highly complex legislation and giant public-administration kludges, a term defined as “an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole.”

That is what Obamacare is proving to be, though it has its bright spots, too among the 14 state exchanges. The law passed in March 2010, but final rules governing how the exchanges were to work were not issued until March 2013. A bid from the main IT contractor, CGI Federal, was accepted in September 2011, but the company did not start critical work until this spring because it was waiting for specifications from the government, leaving too little time to troubleshoot the enormously complex systems CGI and others were setting up.

It’s hard to believe that the whiz kids behind NSA data gathering and analysis couldn’t have done some good here. HealthCare.Gov cost less than 1% of spy agencies’ budgets. But to suggest health IT should command even a fraction of the resources of the intelligence apparatus is a heresy in Schmayek's Town.