From the Washington Post: Capital gains: Spending on contracts and lobbying propels a wave of new wealth in D .C.

For our look at money in politics available to people who know the inside game:

The avalanche of cash that made Washington rich in the last decade has transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders.

The winners in the new Washington are not just the former senators, party consiglieri and four-star generals who have always profited from their connections. Now they are also the former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers for whom unimagined riches are suddenly possible. They are the entrepreneurs attracted to the capital by its aura of prosperity and its super-educated workforce. They are the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.

. . . big companies realized that a few million spent shaping legislation could produce windfall profits. They nearly doubled the cash they poured into the capital.

Who is CGI Federal?

It's one of the contractors responsible for the creation of HealthCare.gov. A total of 55 were involved according to Kliff:

Who built this thing?

Mostly federal contractors -- 55 of them were involved in the project, according to the Government Accountability Office. Two of the biggest contractors are CGI Federal -- more on them here -- and QSSI, which both do a lot of big government contract work. CGI was “in charge of knitting all the pieces together, making Quality Software Services's data hub work seamlessly with Development Seed's sleek user interface and Oracle's identity management software,” Lydia DePillis explained earlier on Wonkblog.

Or, to put it in the contractor’s own words, CGI Senior Vice President Cheryl Campbell said in September that her company was responsible for “designing an IT solution that is adaptable and modular to accommodate the implementation of additional functional requirements and services.”

QSSI, which is owned by the health insurer UnitedHealthCare, built the “federal data hub,” which is essentially responsible for ferrying data from different agencies (like the Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security) to and from the insurance marketplace.

“Simply put, the Data Services Hub is a pipeline that transfers data – routing queries and responses between a given marketplace and various trusted data sources,” QSSI’s Andrew Slavitt wrote in prepared testimony for Thursday morning’s hearing.

Wonkblog has a separate article that describes the number of federal contracts CGI gets and how they get them. Their efforts are a consequence of past efforts to downsize the federal government by outsourcing work that was once done in-house to private contractors. One of the questions raised by the failures of the healthcare.gov is whether outsourcing and privatization might be to responsible. Would these project be better performed in-house?