Obama wants to ‘blow up’ tech purchasing

President Obama on Tuesday called for an overhaul of how the federal government purchases technology.

“The way the federal government does procurement and does [information technology] is just generally not very efficient,” Obama said during a forum hosted by The Wall Street Journal. “In fact, there’s probably no bigger gap between the private sector and the public sector than IT.”

The government system for buying technology has come under scrutiny after the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, the federal website for health insurance exchanges.

{mosads}Obama pointed to problems processing electronic medical records within the Veterans’ Affairs Department and the Defense Department. 

“So what we probably needed to do on the front end was to blow up how we procure for IT, especially on a system this complicated,” he said. 

“We did not do that successfully. Now, we are getting it fixed, but it would have been better to do it on the front end, rather than the back end.”

Unlike private technology purchases, federal agencies must comply with a host of regulations when hiring an IT company.