Yea, I'm pretty positive you're both correct--it was a government related project that they needed utmost of security and secrecy while rapidly building it. All of which are very challenging obstacles for developers
I can absolutely guarantee you that they do not have the utmost of security. For a project to be really secure, you need extremely talented and meticulous developers. Judging by the clusterfuck that was Healthcare.gov's original launch, that does not describe the people involved. For example, this sentence (lifted from Wikipedia) raises a million red flags in my mind re. data consistency checking and sanitation: "Even for those that did manage to enroll, insurance providers later reported some instances of applications submitted through the site with required information missing.". No project like that can feasibly have the "utmost of security".
this probably was the source of the initial failure.