Daily Beast is wrong: Cronyism didn't bring us CGI Global

An excerpted paragraph of an article from the Daily Beast, on the federal rollout of the ACA signup:

Cronyism
“If you want an IT project to fail, allocate a bunch of dollars to it,” wrote former Presidential Innovation Fellow Clay Johnson. “HealthCare.gov isn’t a book by itself. It’s a chapter in an epic saga of large IT implementation screw-ups.” That includes a military veterans health database that is so backed up with unscanned documents that the paper load is collapsing the floor it’s warehoused on.
The company hired to build HealthCare.gov’s failing database, CGI Global, is an established government contractor (established enough to have actually lobbied Congress on the Affordable Care Act). Even though Canada had previously fired the firm for a botched $46.2 million medical registry system in 2011, CGI Global was still contracted to the build the technical keystone of the U.S. healthcare law.
“I think procurement in the federal government is broken. It favors incumbents and the status quo over the lean start-ups in terms of its archaic procurement rules and regulations,” Vivek Kundra, former U.S. chief information officer, told The Washingtonian.
Startups simply don’t have the knowhow to get around the oddly complicated procurement rules—or the congressional ties to curry favor. As a result, a mediocre contractor charged an astounding $93 million for a botched job.

Did you read anything that specified where cronyism occurred?  I didn't.  The only reference to cronyism, is in the second-to-last sentence, which ambiguously presumes that congressional ties leads to awards -- but that is untrue for large projects.  Most jurisdictions have strict rules which prevent the bypassing of the bid process (except for work / services / goods that are below a specified ceiling cost), coupled with strict scoring rules for those bids.  Most of the time where congressional ties help, it's in the award of pork money, not the award of bids.

Flat out, Daily Beast misunderstood how CGI Global obtained the contract.

Lowest qualified bid

Almost all government contracts, whether local, state or federal, select winners based on the lowest price, by law.  Assuming bidders meet the qualifications set by the governing jurisdiction, and depending upon the scoring system used, a crappy contractor's bid can be treated equally to a top notch contractor if their bid prices are matching lowest submitted.

In fact, lowest-qualified bid was meant to counter cronyism.  When cronyism creeps into government contract awards, you'll see it manifested in the awarding of a higher-priced bid.  So sorry, but Daily Beast is flat out wrong.

But that doesn't mean that lowest qualified bid works.  Administratively, bid documents must be complete and clear.  Often, lowest bidders use gaps in bid documents to add post-award contract cost increases.

Further, once you're in the middle of a contract, the reality is that the larger the cost, the greater the disincentive to cut your losses.  If it was your fault for clarity in your bid documents, are you really going to cut off the contract and move on to sign a new contractor?

Procurement rules are supposed to be complicated

Let's say you want to buy a pack of bubble gum.  All you need is a simple contract that says, "give me the lowest price for the procurement of bubble gum", right?  Wrong:

• Trust -- a handshake does not seal a deal; you need to have rules as to who can bid.  Do you want felons?  What about potential felons -- drug-testing?  To do this, you need to know the background of all the people involved in the procurement of bubble gum.
• Protocols -- if you want to evaluate bids on equal footing, you need to define the protocols of how those bids are written and processed.  You should try to dig through a 20-page bid, trying to figure out if a prospective bid contains everything you requested.
• Penalties -- if you don't have penalties for failure to deliver bubble gum on time, at the correct place, and for the agreed-upon price, then you might be severely dissatisfied.
• Bonuses -- maybe you actually want bubble gum now, not a week from now, so to incentivize contractors to deliver early, you outline the bonuses for early delivery on contract.
• Bid security -- if someone offers a price that you can't refuse, what happens if that person changes their mind after you've awarded them the bid?
• Specifics -- does any bubble gum work?  Do you accept bubble gum that has expired, or was made in Bangladesh with unknown materials, utilizing child-labor?

But dammit, all you wanted was some bubble gum!?!  If we're talking about a multi-million dollar project, you should expect it to be a lot more complex.