"We're federal agents from the CGI, ma'am. Nothing to be concerned about. We just need to ask you a few questions."Actually CGI Federal is the US offshoot of the Canadian registered CGI Group. The CGI Group has the unique distinction of being fired by not only the government of Canada but by the Province of Ontario. One supposes that when competent Kate Sebilius was browsing through the yellow pages to find someone to build an awesome new website for Obamacare she didn't exercise due diligences by checking them out on Angie's List, Consumer Reports, or the Better Business Bureau. Maybe she reasoned that since cgi is a standard method used to generate dynamic content on web pages and web applications the name said it all. Actually the origin of the name is French Canadian, Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique. Then again, maybe Kate is a Francophile and thought of Chanel, Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent and reasoned building an interactive website would be child's play for the same great people who gave the world the lobster dress. In any event, she screwed up.
"The CGI! Oh my God! You mean the Clinton Global Initiative?" God! What have I done?"
"Not that CGI ma'am."
"Then it must be the Common Gateway Interface. Of course. The tinted windows on your SUV are a dead give-away. But I don't know anything about gateway drugs and I scrapped my Gateway 2000 computer in 1999 to dodge the Y 2K catastrophe."
Mark Steyn details CGI's failures in one of his always great posts at NRO. Their most famous, or rather infamous, government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. Liberal governments always know clever ways make costly programs sound cheap. In this case every long gun in Canada would be registered for the out of pocket expense of only $2 million dollars. Registration fees would generate $117 million and CGI would build the the registry for $119 million. The rosy projection was off by a factor of a thousand. Before the Harper government euthanized it, the program cost Canadian taxpayers $2 billion and the cost per registered firearm had grown from the estimated $4.60 to $300. Worse yet Canada’s auditor general reported that the database often omitted important information such as names, addresses, and types of firearm. CGI was hired by Ontario to build a database for diabetes. That's just one disease in one province. After spending $46 million Ontario scrapped the project.
The Daily Caller reports that the senior vice president of CGI Federal, Toni Townes is a Princeton classmate of Michelle Obama. That hardly proves anything untoward and it is reassuring that Michelle has classmates from Princeton who remember her unlike Barack who has no classmates who remember him from Columbia.CGI's history of incompetence perfectly qualifies it for a leadership role in the Obama administration.
Yeah, except that CGI was the only company whose bid was even perused. Plus there's that sticky problem of Obama donations coming from the company's higher ups, just like all the Solyndras out there. Government contracts are one big racket, top to bottom. From Daily Caller,
ReplyDeleteAs reported by the Washington Examiner in early October, the Department of Health and Human Services reviewed only CGI’s bid for the Obamacare account.