It may seem like a wonkish concern, but the federal government’s computer problems have created everything from alarming security breaches to annoying glitches that make the bureaucracy more inefficient than it already is. The General Accounting Office recently issued a Greatest Hits collection of reported federal government computer foul-up Since 1989, GAO investigators have found 16 cases involving security breaches, albeit few as egregious as that involving Hayes. (The Justice Department says it has dispatched investigators to its offices all over the country to ensure such a foul-up is never repeated.) The GAO also reprised a staggering 116 reports detailing other troubles, including financial problems-like how fast the IRS audits taxpayers-as well as life-and-death issues, such as the soundness of air-traffic-control systems.
The government spent roughly $20 billion on computer systems last year. Yet as businesses have scurried to keep pace wit rapid technological changes, sluggish government bureaucracies have had a hard time keeping up. It’s not that government workers still use three-by-five-inch cards and carbon paper-sometimes they computerize with too much gusto, like someone who buys a turbo-charged rider mower to tame a few yards of front lawn. The National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest science- and medical-research facility, recently bought an $800 million state-of-the-art IBM mainframe-computer system. Dr. Alistair Steven, a structural biologist there, says the system is lightning fast, powerful and very expensive. Only one problem, he says: “We don’t use it.” Dr. George Michaels, another biologist, says he ignores that system and works on his Macintosh IIfx desktop computer and SUN desktop workstation. While the highly technical IBM system is a favorite of agency administrators and numbercrunching computer programmers who helped select the system, it doesn’t do what the average scientist needs. Government agencies have been slow to mimic the private-sector trend toward “rightsizing,” or using appropriate technology.
Some of the problems stem from raw fear and ignorance of computers. Frank Pittelli, a consultant who has worked with the government, sees it as a generational conflict between the Stone Age managers intimidated by scary computer jargon and young whizzes who can infiltrate enemy military systems with their laptops but aren’t experienced enough to understand how government agencies work. The managers end up delegating computerization to the “techies,” who in turn recommend complicated systems that may have little relation to the agency’s needs. “The government tends to let technology direct them and not direct the technology themselves,” he says.
The Pentagon is moving ahead with a major new computer network for military hospitals, even though an early working model at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., has severely hampered the doctors’ ability to find medical records and lab results. “We are headed for certain disaster,” one doctor complained on the system’s electronic message board. Pentagon officials have acknowledged that the system has troubles but have insisted that no patients have been harmed as a result.
The government often manages its information as if it were running a 1950s assembly line. It puts in fancy new computers but clings to a strict division of labor between workers performing different, sequential tasks. In effect, they “do the same wrong thing [they’ve] always done faster,” says Rona Stillman, a GAO computer expert. An IRS examiner auditing a complicated return has to obtain documents from six or more different departments, unconnected by any central computer. Examiners must write to their colleagues, formally requesting information, and then retype the data into their own computer. The IRS is working on an $8 billion plan to modernize this system by the year 2000. But don’t hold your breath: the last attempt to modernize was the Automated Examination System which is being partially scrapped, since projected costs ballooned by more than $800 million to $1.8 billion. IRS officials acknowledge that the current system is an inefficient “hodgepodge” of different computers and paper files, but pledge that the new system will be much more efficient and less expensive.
In some cases, the government has the right idea, but takes just a tad too long to get there. The navy, for instance, launched an ambitious plan to improve its payroll and accounting system … by 1982. (Current completion date: 1994, a mere 12 years overdue.) The top brass asked midlevel commands to devise a coherent system. Each, naturally, wanted the computer geared toward its needs. Though a major goal of the programs was to stop excess payments to personnel, losses actually rose from $6 million in 1979 to almost $15 million in 1989. That’s not to say the system isn’t an improvement. A 1979 internal audit found the navy’s payroll system was inaccurate 48 percent of the time.
Sometimes the inability or unwillingness to make different computers work together-“integration” in computer lingo-grows out of privacy concerns. Congress delayed for years giving the Department of Education the right to create a master list of student-loan recipients, fearing that would smack of Big Brotherism. As a result, the department failed to crack down on rampant studentloan defaults. Tommy Wayne Downs, a former barber-school operator, signed up hundreds of fake borrowers and pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in government loan money. “I’m just a clown who figured out who left the candy store open,” said Downs in a telephone interview from a federal prison in Memphis, Tenn., where he is serving 10 years for bank fraud. He says he was able to pull it off for a while because of a simple loophole: students had to pay back loans only after they left school, so he kept telling the government that all his pupils were still studying how to cut hair. And since the government wasn’t checking the fake students’social-security numbers, he was able to get away with it.
Even students who have already defaulted on government loans don’t seem to have trouble getting new ones. In 1991, the department gave $200 million in loans to students with a proven record of not paying them back, the agency’s inspector general estimated. The Department of Education will start checking social-security numbers in a few months and expects to have a complete integrated system by 1994.
Many of these computer problems aren’t exclusive to the government. Private companies fall prey to a similar tendency to emphasize gee-whiz technology over systems that actually work better. But the private sector usually can correct its mistakes and adapt more quickly. The government’s tendency toward lethargy is exacerbated by the speed of its “revolving door”: specialists who do master new gadgetry leave their agencies to join the private sector. Congress has been homing in on the federal computer troubles in recent years. But the government won’t be able to solve its computer problems until it learns how to, well, stop acting like the government.
