Terminal Idiots

...What takes one year for the private sector to do, we're taking four to five years to do, and the half-life of this stuff is about a year," says former Internal Revenue Service commissioner Fred T. Goldberg, Jr...

...Buying enormous systems for agencies that can't afford a moment's down time makes the government's purchases tricky enough...

...Not to worry, pesticide experts at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington reassured them...

...The Resolution Trust Corporation depends on a computerized real estate index to help it dispose of $17 billion in bottom-of-the-barrel assets from failed S&Ls...

...But the latest information extends only to 1991, a defect that sticks taxpayers with up to $800,000 a day in bad loans that would not have been guaranteed if the records were up to date, according to Education's inspector general...

...Uncle Sam is the laughing stock of the private sector when it comes to buying computers," says former AT&T computer executive Steven Broadbent, who was until January the Treasury Department's top computer authority...

...After combing the EPA's computerized $14 million pesticide library, they concluded that the chemical, meta sodium, presented no known risk to humans...

...Even small agencies have tended to buy their own computers and custom software, resulting in terrific proliferation and bewildering variety...

...Among the measures is a special General Services Board of Contract Appeals that has decided in favor of bid protesters in more than a third of all challenges brought in recent years...

...Now, according to the General Accounting Office (GAO), they're stuck with $40 billion in over-ordered stocks...

...Often someone who's no longer around...

...If procurements take four years, there's a high mathematical probability that the person who put in the order is long gone when the full scope of the disaster becomes clear...

...But the index lacks vital information—like purchase prices and brokers' names—in four out of five entries sampled by GAO investigators...

...George Bush never turned on his computer, but I would expect Clinton's people to be different...

...Now hospital doctors refuse to use what one Walter Reed physician described in recent E-mail as "a monstrous mish-mash of second-rate, poorly designed programs...

...Thus it's quite impossible to say with certainty whether additional dollars to clean up pollution are best spent on Su-perfund or air pollution...

...The idea was to make it easier for EPA employees and the public to track polluters and the EPA's actions against them...

...Many veteran users trusted only Louis Rossi, a supervisor who kept paper records on file...

...Efforts to develop a central computer record of all cases in litigation have been stymied at the Justice Department for 13 years...

...Some insist it's a stack in the air...

...VThe Veterans Benefit Administration, concerned that it took an average of 151 days to decide whether a veteran was disabled, spent $94 million on new computers to speed up claims...

...Making matters worse, the bureaucratic imperatives all favor thinking small and using eccentric computers to protect turf...

...Willfully oblivious to phone lines and optical scanners, the IRS flies tapes to National Airport from regional centers, then trucks them to the IRS's national data center in Martinsburg, West Virginia...

...Today, Veterans Affairs offices run at least 150 different computer systems...

...His proposed 1994 budget accelerates spending for computer modernization at the IRS and the Social Security Administration...

...Meanwhile, more than $20 billion of the debt is approaching the statute of limitations...

...A month later, two toxicology reports warning that the chemical could cause cancer, sterility, and miscarriages turned up...

...And it's still down, so there's no way of knowing whether the PBGC's 60,000 pension plans are complying...

...Many of the mistakes are made by taxpayers...

...Private buyers relied heavily on those factors...

...It's a cultural gap," says Wallace Keene, a senior computer manager at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration...

...The Agency for International Development operates at least 75...

...But nearly four years later, EPA officials still can't agree on the definition of "facility...

...When we've tried to, they've almost universally been failures...

...Researchers prefer personal computers...

...The reports, submitted in 1986 and 1990, had been inaccurately summarized and then misfiled, which was no surprise to anyone familiar with the system...

...Now it takes 140 days...

...Small problem: "We're not using it," says biologist Alasdair Steven...

...Some insist each building in a factory complex is a polluting facility...

...Panda bears are more common in Washington, and the result is that the world's biggest computer customer—$150 billion in the past 10 years—is also one of the dumbest...

...The Agriculture Department can't define a farm...

...Desirable qualifications include practical experience working in or writing about politics and government...

...If something goes wrong, you've got to wonder whether it's the Sun platform, the Amdahl front end, the IBM mainframe...

...The IRS is now shopping for a huge, new $23 billion system, a purchase bound to be rare fun for government waste watchers...

...Justice has about as many...

...You have to change engines on the train while it's going 50 miles an hour, pulling a thousand cars...

...Programming the tax system of tomorrow, for instance, will take an estimated 2 million lines of flawless programming compared to the 40,000 it takes IBM to handle its payroll...

...It's a procurement process designed to fail...

...The reason, according to researcher Steven Kelman of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is that acquisition rules emphasize weighing factors in awarding contracts as objectively as possible...

...In practice, the GSA lacks the expertise and clout to resist what senior political appointees propose, and it has almost never done so...

...A j few examples: ^ • For years, the armed services ordered 5 supplies based on inaccurate inventories ? June 1993/The Washington Monthly 15 kept by incompatible computers...

...But the government's learning curve has been spectacularly dismal, and when its financial managers make mistakes, they are extremely expensive...

...Other federal computer follies are so dumb they're tragicomic: >Air Force systems engineers spent $1.6 billion to modernize the attack warning center at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, without ever determining whether adequate electrical power is available for the new computers...

...The practice so offended House Government Operations Committee chairman Jack Brooks, a Texas Democrat, that he used the 1984 Competition in Contracting Act to open up the computer markets...

...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...

...others, a pipe in the water...

...But Clinton's best-known computer initiative—the vaunted National Information Highway system, pushed by his rich Silicon Valley supporters—has this irony: It calls for increased federal help to the computer industry, rather than the other way around...

...But hundreds of thousands of these errors occur during the IRS's touchingly arcane process of transcribing onto magnetic tape, by hand, the figures on paper returns submitted by more than 70 million taxpayers...

...He should know...

...The air, water, hazardous waste, and pesticide offices of the EPA, for example, all operate independent systems that measure pollutants differently...

...At one time, federal managers didn't really shop for their computers...

...So redundant and confused were the agency's nine data bases that information was constantly getting lost...

...That may bode well for change, but thus far Clinton has done little to clear up the growing computer catastrophe the administration inherited...

...Taxpayers owe the IRS $71 billion in back taxes and are suspected of evading another $100 billion, but IRS computers are too slow and inaccurate to chase deadbeats efficiently...

...VThe Farmers Home Administration invested $500 million in computers five years ago to manage mortgage loans at the county level...

...The jobs for which Washington needs computers are already convoluted...

...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...

...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...

...Justice's divisions can't quite agree on what constitutes a "case...

...The sums squandered on each of the government's hardware debacles, multiplied by the havoc these systems create, are adding up fast and soon the computer scandals of the nineties could make us all nostalgic for the Pentagon's procurement scams of the eighties...

...This is the greatest scandal in government computer procurement," says Kelman...

...The result is often a mess: an IBM mainframe, an Amdahl front end processor, storage from Storage Tech, a network courtesy of AT&T, and user terminals provided by Sun...

...Defense Department doctors didn't have much say in a $500 million system to computerize care records for their 2 million patients...

...HUD can only estimate its total...

...Applications should be accompanied by a list of three references and by writing samples that demonstrate fact-gathering and analytical ability...

...they simply and re-flexively bought IBM...

...As a rule, they are eccentric and inefficient, bought to solve management problems that they've instead made permanent...

...The National Institutes of Health spent $200 million on a mainframe system to assist "researchers pushing the frontiers of biomedical research...

...There was no disaster in the Sacramento valley, thanks to an industry hotline and alert state environmental officials who warned people against drinking locally drawn water...

...It's a mass delusion for us to pretend we know how to build the enormous systems we need," says Rona Stillman, chief computer scientist for the GAO...

...The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) is supposed to charge higher premiums to companies that don't fully fund their pension obligations...

...Changing procurement rules, however, won't be enough...

...Not surprisingly, this sympathetic court has brought out the caution in bureaucrats and the litigiousness in losing bidders, and it is widely blamed for slowing computer acquisitions...

...Classification is not a problem unique to the EPA...

...But local officials still use color-coded paper files because the Agriculture Department has yet to devise functional software...

...IRS computers waste 100 million taxpayer hours a year due to errors, according to a former commissioner...

...Frank Greve is a Knight-Ridder national correspondent...

...But the computer used to figure and track the higher premiums crashed in 1989...

...Job Opening The Washington Monthly will soon have an opening for a reporter-editor...

...VTo assure that borrowers get no new student loans if they've defaulted on old ones, the Education Department relies on a computerized loan history data bank...

...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...

...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...

...Terminal illness Anyone who's tried to master a new computer system knows how confusing the experience can be...

...Shrewd computer buying requires attention from informed, decisive managers able to act fast and willing to take risks...

...Since reputations are difficult to quantify, the government simply doesn't take them into account...

...And NIST's federal computer bureau is tiny, academic, and generally uninvolved with questions about computer applications...

...If you start with a mess and simply add technology, you end up with an automated mess," says Henry Philcox, the Internal Revenue Service's chief computer specialist...

...others say the whole complex counts as one...

...Oops...

...Indeed, according to press secretary Dee Dee Myers, Clinton's thirtysomething appointees went into "technoshock" at finding that the most advanced equipment at the White House when they arrived in January were electric typewriters...

...Moreover, because service and even hardware contracts are regularly recomputed, the company that provided the machines and programmed the system may not be around either...

...In theory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tests technologies and promotes compatibility...

...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...

...Servicing becomes a very complex problem," says Treasury's Broadbent...

...Like scores of other federal managers, IRS officials, who have sought new computers since 1970, blame the government's convoluted procurement rules...

...Terminal Idiots Nobody's dumber at buying computers than Uncle Sam by Frank Greve w hen a railroad tank car filled with pesticide overturned into the Sacramento River two summers ago, killing fish as far as 22 miles downstream, California authorities feared for the health of riverside residents...

...It focuses solely on the most technical issues...

...The result is not simply chaos, but a frittering away of what computers are meant to do: help people think better, faster...

...It isn't—no small problem for a complex required to be self-sufficient in wartime...

...Across the federal landscape, offices are littered with unused, redundant, antiquated, ill-conceived, and incompatible systems...

...Mega bites Recognizing the problem, many would-be big thinkers have tried to unify information systems by developing common definitions and data entry protocols...

...Rotten apples Who's making these dumb decisions...

...More important are intelligence, humor, and the willingness to work long hours for low pay...

...But the incident provides a dramatic glimpse of the government's disastrous effort to computerize itself...