Among the community of programmers, designers and plain-old technology lovers who have long advocated for the federal government to improve its IT game, there has been a complaint that all too often, tech work is treated as something marginal or administrative, not vested with the same sort of weight that nearly everything else in the political realm carries.
Those days are over. Today marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of HealthCare.gov. And Republicans are still using the Web site's deeply flawed launch to make the case for what's wrong with the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration and Democrats in general.
Take Joni Ernst, running for Senate in Iowa against Rep. Bruce Braley. Ernst put out a statement Wednesday that used the site's error messages and other failings as a proxy for everything that's wrong with the health insurance reform bill. "One year ago, as Americans tried, and failed, to enroll in the Obamacare Web site," the Republican candidate, locked in a tight race, explained, "they came face to face for the first time with the failure of government-run health care."
Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Rep. Renee Ellmers tweeted out a screenshot from launch day. "The system is down at the moment," read HealthCare.gov that day. "We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Please try again later." Here's Ellmers:
And then there's Alabama Rep. Martha Roby:
West Virginia Rep. David McKinley:
Andy Tobin, running for Congress in Arizona, pinned the Web site's failings on his opponent, who had been in the U.S. House of Representatives all of 10 months when the site launched:
Political advocacy groups joined in, too, like the behemoth Americans for Prosperity:
AFP seized the chance to promote its own technical prowess:
"The launch didn't work but then it got fixed. And the facts speak for themselves," said Michael Czin, the Democratic National Committee's national press secretary, who went on to state the Democrats own talking points on health insurance reform. "The rate of uninsured is going down, health-care costs are slowing, and people like their health care."
There are those in the government IT world who, quietly, point to the eventual rebooting of HealthCare.gov — a process recently described by U.S. Digital Service director Mikey Dickerson, who worked on the project — as a demonstration of how well federal technology production can work. But they realize that it's not a terrific poster child for government innovation successes.
Still, HealthCare.gov's failings have succeeded in making government IT a political topic. They've gotten what they wanted, even if it's not the way they would have wanted it.