WASHINGTON — The first stages of President Obama’s federal health care law have been anything but smooth. The president himself has publicly admitted the website is filled with glitches and people are having a tough time enrolling.

It is leading lawmakers to ramp up scrutiny on tech companies that helped build the site, including many local firms.

“We plan to ask them what went wrong, why it went wrong and when they knew about it,” explains Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo. “We have a lot of questions.”

Gardner sits on the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which has invited representatives from four companies to testify on Thursday.

“We are starting to see and hear from contractors who were raising red flags about the software from the very initial stages of development and those were ignored,” Gardner says.

Committee members want to hear from CGI Federal and Serco, which are both based in Virginia. QSSI, headquartered in Maryland, has also been invited to testify.

The fourth company, Equifax, is based in Georgia.

“We met with them early in this process and they said everything was going fine. We need to get to the bottom of why there is a different story today,” says Gardner.

Follow @WTOP on Twitter.