Sometimes the truth is partisan. The government really doesn't have any incentive to be efficient, and really does dump giant amounts of money into a bonfire on a regular basis:
Partisan nothing. It's only partisan if you think large private corps are somehow immune to wasting money. You think IBM charges fair, efficient prices for their private consulting? Big and bloated is big and bloated, whether it's Capital-G Government or the behaloed private sector.
I'd be willing to gamble real money on the following 2 facts about this project:
1) First thing IBM did was bill themselves for a couple hundred licenses of their own software.
2) The majority of the money was pissed away in meetings, and the majority of the dev time was spent on horrible multi-thousand line stored procedures for the ETL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ