>> this is al jazeera america live from new york city, this is tony harris. talking about spying rules, jeremgerman and french leaders t discussion after allegations of spying on world leaders. pakistan shared some of the blame for u.s. drone strikes in its tribal regions. they knew about and approved the strikes. pakistan denies any involvement. the new manager of the affordable care act website is

vowing to fix it saying most people will be able to use it by the end of the november. healthcare.gov will no longer be overseen by medicare and medicaid officials. we are learning more about the national guard recruiter accused of shooting officers in tennessee. officials say amos patton was being relieved of duty by two of his supports when he shot them. the victimsthose are your headlt this hour. "inside story" is next. >> the glitches in the healthcare website. bad news for the obama administration. and worse news for federal contractors. they're getting slammed.

and contractors are now crucial to the government operations. that's tonight on "inside story." >> hello everybody, i'm david shuster. it is blame game time in washington, d.c. when government fails, the finger pointing begins, and americans wonder how do these mistake happen? the prime case is the online health exchange website. the government hired private companies to do the job, but none of this outsourcing is new. as back as world war ii the government would outsource to private companies. government contracting is really big business, and we'll be

discussing the pros and cons of tonight's inside story. but first this background. >> do you swear that the testimony you're about to give. >> reporter: at the center of the storm over the problems of healthcare.gov , the new insurance exchange website. >> how we end up with contractors who say essentially everything is all right when it isn't. >> they should have hired a contractor. >> we are the prime contractors yes. >> yes, contractors. they are the federal government's lifeline when they need help getting the job done. but this time they apparently dropped the ball. >> top administration officials and lead contractors appear before this committee, looked us in the eye and assured us repeatedly that everything was on track except that it wasn't as we now know too well. >> reporter: thousands of contractors were hired to design and build the insurance exchange's website and when the site went live earlier this month, very few consumers can

get through it. the president was infuriated. >> nobody is madder than me that the website isn't working as well as it should, which means it's going to get fixed. there is no sugarcoating it. the website has been too slow. people have been stuck during the application process. >> we understand the frustration many people have felt since healthcare.gov was launched. >> reporter: congress is looking into what went wrong. cgi federal, the key information technology contractor behind the site. with an $88 million contract cgi worked along government appointees to put it all together. >> why doesn't healthcare.gov work properly. >> if there is with a silver bullet to answer that question, i would give it to you. >> reporter: now the deadline to sign up has been pushed back another six weeks as the government scrambles to fix it. it is just the latest in a series of problems in the

symbiotic relationship between the federal government and the contractors it employs. >> an update on the. >> edward snowden. >> edward snowden, who made all those top-secret documents public. >> reporter: edward snowden may be the most visible example of the probable in the system. he fled the united states with headlines of high tech domestic spying. >> when you're in a position of privileged access, you're exposed to a lot more information on broader scale than the average employee. >> reporter: snowdon had a high level security clears with his employer. he disappeared with classified information that has led to embarrassing friction with u.s. allies. questions surround a country called u.s. investigative services that did the background check on snowdon.

>> the nation's capitol under siege. >> reporter: in september aaron alexis shot and killed 12 people at the navy yard in washington, d.c. a civilian contractor to the navy he had been discharged after multiple misconduct i wants. they had done his background check as well. the world of government contracting is full of mutual need and cooperation. but after years of outsourcing of federal functions, scrutiny of private sector firms has ignited questions as to where taxpayer money is going and what is getting done. since the attacks of septembe september 11, 2001, technicians made up of hundreds of thousands of contractors, the obama administration requested $48 billion in the budget for

granted to national intelligence program. as much as 70% of that request will go towards private contractors. >> joining us now to discuss the challenges of the federal government's contracting process and some solutions are tim, a contract analyst for federal government union, and in paris, patrick johnson for booz allen hamilton, and larry allen, president of allen partners and consults contractors. what do you think of the huge glitch of this contract and what happened? >> like most problem in government contracting, it takes two to tango. i think there is blame on the government side. >> specifically how, though? >> ambitious in terms of their rollout. we know in the commercial market

rolling out a project of this size would take at least twice as long. there would have been a lot more vetting before it went live, and yet with this project as with other projects i've seen over the last 24 years a lot of business processes, business goals get subordinated when you're talking about a government acquisition program with strong political overtones and this one certainly qualifies. >> as far as healthcare.gov applies, many say this project should have cost $300 million. who is responsible for making this mistake in terms of lowballing it to get it off the ground. >> who is responsible is the government agency who set up the program. the problem that i see in contracting in general is that contracting is expanded like crazy over the last 20 years. we all know that. but the people who actually overseoversee contracting withie

government that stayed about the same. basically oversight is not happening. >> patrick, there has been a huge discussion in the united states about oversighting and kathleen sebelius, and whether or not she should be fired as a result of this. does she ultimately bear the responsibility for a huge contractor who drops the ball within her agency. >> it's tough to point fingers at one person. ultimately when you look at the work that the government contractors are delivering, and this is true in the healthcare rollout as well, you have contractors respond to go a set of requirements put together by the contract agency within the government. they are overburdened and oftentimes short staffed so sometimes those requirement mayy not be as complete as they should, but they're also responding to the outlines by the government. >> when you're talking about a

project of this magazine any taught are there certaimagnitud? >> you have contract and management issues. we know of other contract with o & b interest that contracting agencies hop to when they feel a sense of urgency, you can only imagine how many times that is amplified when it's a white house pet project. they have probably been on pins and needles on this project. >> over at cgi, what do you imagine is going through their minds right now in terms of moving forward. how big of a hit do they take in this, or is there no hit at all because the government needs them so badly to get this done? >> no, there is a hit over at cgi. like one of the previous commentators said, the whole contracting space has exploded over the past couple of decades,

particularly the last five or ten years. it's hyper competitive. there are just a lot of firms willing and able to step in and basically step in the shoes that cgi is currently in. they're going to do whatever it takes to recover. it's really their only option. i'm sure they'll put everyone they have on this. >> they're staying with us. when we come back we'll talk again about how the government gets the job done through the use of contractors, particularly when it comes to national security. more with our guests in a moment. you're watching inside story. >> how old are you? >> nine. >> how old were you when you first started working out here? >> seven. >> fault lines how children are hired by us agriculture to help put food on america's tables. >> in any other industry kids need to be 16 years old to be able to work. you don't see any of that in agriculture. >> they don't ask, "is she 12?". they just want their job done. >> how many of you get up before 5 o'clock in the morning?

>> we're continuing our discussion about government contracting. our panel, patrick, i want to start with you in a second. booz allen hamilton were the employer of edward snowdon. we know what sort of damage he has caused. has booz allen hamilton taken enough responsibility in this? >> the snowdon case has been

getting headlines and rightly so, but i think it highlights a couple of failures in the way that the system is set pup while he's identified as a booz allen hamilton employee, he had just recently switched over from another government contractor where he had been working on the project. it's common fo employees to swih badges and from my understanding he had gone through a lot of security clearance processes previously. a firm like booz allen while we have an enough of cleared or while the number has a number of cleared staff with secret and top-secret clearances. those are clearances that are issued by the federal government. so any of the staff, snowdon included, would have gone through that vetting process. >> have they become so reliant

on contractors that it's hard to keep control of all of this, whether its checking backgrounds, credentials and make sure they have the appropriate background t to work on the project they're tasked with? >> so often the attention is paid to putting the contracts in place and getting competition, having transparency at the front end. there's what is missed is this whole back end of credit the awarded, what type of government management do you provide and what type of incentive do you pride for acquisition workforce to manage something that either they put in place or somebody else has put in place. simply put, the acquisition is incentivized for that type of management. there is no clear path ahead. there is only a clear career path ahead for awarding more

contracts. >> how can the federal government, how come they're not a better manager of this? >> i think some of it has to do with the fact that in acquisition we operate at a tactical level most of the time. it's very hard to get strategic unless you're talking about a major program like the tanker program or another major weapons system. there are a lot fewer acquisition people in the government than there were in the beginning of the 1990s. some of that is by design. some of that is through attrition. so we have a lot fewer people and a lot more responsibility in the government just haven't kept pace with that. >> particularly perhaps the national security area it's more important for contractors to get as many contracts as they can, and less important perhaps to do a quality job or to finish the project on time because there are fewer people in the government monitoring that? >> well, i think the real story with the snowdon leaks and what happened with booz allen is that booz allen was doing an

unbelievable amount of work i in the intelligence community. and here you have a guy with this kind of access to very classified information, highly classified information, all the documents he has gotten were clearly available to him as a booz allen contractor. it makes me question why we have booz allen doing that kind of work at that level. we as a country need to draw the line and say above this line we're only going to have government-trained people. that means hiring a lot more people to do it for the government, that's what we should do. i don't think we should have booz allen carrying out these classified operations. >> isn't the reason with we're doing this is because the government decided that the private industry can do this better than government. and rather than having the government do this, let's ship it out to private industry. >> it's not merely the government deciding that. there is a lot of pressure from contractors and from their supporters on the hill, capitol hill, lawmakers to open up areas to more contracting.

contractors lobby very heavily. there is no doubt about that. and i think there has been decisions by the government to allow certain functions to be contracted that they never have done. they never should have had the contract. >> doesn't that open the door up for more corruption? we have more contracts with more high end business and there is less oversight. >> i don't know that there's is anything inherently corrupt about the acquisition workforce on either the government side or contractor side. you certainly have good stories that can be told about people acting in a corrupt illegal manner on whether they were badged federal or contractor. >> the navy this past week the way they did acquisitions, and the way they had ships serviced overseas there was corruption involved. >> right, exactly. so it's not immune--contractors are not immune, so, too, neither

are government employees. i think it speaks to the integrity of the person or someone to be showing oversight. i tend to agree with tim that that oversight should be provided by the government because we're talking about taxpayer dollars that are in play here, and ultimately it's the government's procurement roles that have to be followed. and you can't be put in the position of traffic cop. >> and patrick, who is at fault with all of this? if we agree with the premise that the government has cut back on its oversight role and its farmed out some of the management of some of these contractors, whose responsibility is that? is that the government's fault? the contractor's fault. >> if i had to point the finger it would be more on the government side. when you look at the contracting space, it is so competitive, and there are so many highly skilled, trained people there a

lot of consultants and contractors who are being staffed on these jobs are former federal employees or military personnel themselves who are hired in these firms. they have a huge incentive to deliver and deliver well. that's why i think that cgi will do whatever it can to recover because these firms really do rely a lot on the reputation, and they have a lot riding on every project. >> patrick, larry and tim are staying with us as we took to the united states government and what that means when we come back after this. what happens when social media uncovers unheard, fascinating news stories? >> they share it on the stream. >> social media isn't an after-thought, it drives discussion across america. >> al jazeera america's social media community, on tv and online. >> this is your outlet for those conversations. >> post, upload and interact. >> every night share undiscovered stories.

>> we're continuing our discussion of federal government contracting with tim, contract

analyst for government employee union, and patrick johnson a former booz allen associate, and larry allen, former business partners. given some of the problems we've seen with ed snowdon and all the rest, is the answer to pull some of this responsibility out of the contractors and give it back to the government. how would it work? >> i think so. i think in a previous segment we talked a little bit about oversight. you cannot have contractors running other contractors. there is built in business. they have business with all of those companies. that has got to be brought in-house. agency where is that has been weakened, that has to be strengthened. that means recruitment and

training. we have to spend some money on that. >> as far as spending money, larry, it was clear that hhs, one of the reasons they had to outsource so much of this website they didn't have the brain power within as far as code writers and building up website in the government, nothing for something like this, is that the fundamental flaw as far as healthcare.gov . they just didn't have the people there. >> well, it's a microcosm of a larger issue. it's not a partisan issue. this is something that happened while we had a democratic and a white house and the republican control that at least one house of congress. so it happens regardless of political stripe. it's just a phenomenon of the 90s where the government was down sized and reinvented. and then it expertise, or

engineering it or other types of specialty knowledge, it walked out of the government, and it has not been replaced sense. >> the litany, whether you're talking about blackwater, what happened in iraq, abu ghraib, edward snowdon, are there going to be embarrassed government because of malfeasance of the contractor? >> i this there is a number of things hat play here. within the scope of the government contracting expanded, it's easy to point to some of the failures, and certainly those failures have been pretty massive. but government contracting isn't a new thing. my previous firm booz allen first started providing support to the u.s. navy during world waworldwar ii in 1940.

and then the work of nasa in the 60s and 70s, a lot of that was driven by the contractors and consultants, and there were failures back then. one of the early shuttles could not operate because the computer systems were not able to talk to one another. it sounds a little bit familiar. i think you will continue to see some problems. but i think a lot of that is driven by the fact that we're working with highly complex programs. oftentimes you have multiple fronts collaborating on these assignments, and you might not have a technical confidence to management to oversee effectively. >> i know they're going to haul in members of the administration, i know the president is infuriated. if you could talk about how to fix the general problem and deliver a message to the white house, what would it be? >> there has to be som some joit

responsibility on this. you can't blame just the contractor. the contractor had a complex job in rolling out healthcare.gov in a compressed time frame with a lot of people looking over their shoulder, people looking over their shoulder without much knowledge of government acquisition. they just knew what they wanted the end product to look like. >> do you think it was evenly applied in this case? it looks like the republicans are going to blast the obama administration, and they may say it's the contractors' fault. >> i don't see republicans looking at the core issue, which is the deterioration of the in-house acquisition workforce because they've been cutting that kind of spending for years. i think if republicans from honest, they would have to build up the in-house capabilities.

it's too easy with what they're doing. why didn't the program work. there have been years of cut thong program. >> how is this fixed in the next couple of weeks, and the next couple of months. where does the story go? >> i'm not really sure. but i'm watching it with interest like everybody else. i think it's a complex program and i think there could be potential good behind it. i hope that it ends up getting fixed and there is a proper roll out. >> any predictions about healthcare.gov and what it will take to fix it. >> i think they'll get more people in there and it will take more spending but i'm one of the people who would like to see the healthcare.gov expanded. >> and is there lasting damage if they're able to get things

fixed in the next six months. >> i think it will be fixed. i think we've got smart people who are working on it. probably shouldn't have been rolled out when it was. this will blow over and we'll all live to do business again. >> thanks for being part of the program. we appreciate it. that is it from the team here in washington, d.c. and from me, david shuster. you can keep the discussion going by logging on to our facebook page. thanks for watching, everybody, have a great weekend.

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