Health Exchange Security and Transparency Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, famously, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, We have nothing to fear but fear itself. That is not true here and, sadly, the last speaker is entitled to his opinion, but the facts do not bear out his conclusions.

The truth is that actual interviews and depositions taken of the highest-ranking people that helped develop this Web site, both public and private, show there was no end-to-end testing. It did not meet the spirit of any definition of a secure Web site.

In fact, the highest-ranking person, Teresa Fryer, on September 20, was unwilling to recommend this site go active, and said under oath that if it had been within her authority to stop it, she would have.

It is very clear, even from the White House's statements in the last few days, that they claim to have mitigated or have a plan to mitigate significant security risks. The American people need to understand a plan to mitigate means they have not mitigated security risks.

This is the situation we are in, in which no private sector company, including Target, would go live with a system that has known failures and unknown failures because of a failure to do end-to-end.

All we are asking for is, since Secretary Sebelius, under oath, has been wrong on multiple occasions, I have called for her to make clear that she made false statements. The fact is what we need is a law that makes it clear that they should do the right thing, not say they have always done the right thing and they will do the right thing, because in the case of healthcare.gov, they launched a site that was neither functionally ready, nor had it been security tested, and it had known failures that were not mitigated prior to the launch.

Those are the facts, Mr. Speaker, and I ask for support of this bill.

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