On Thursday morning, Kathleen Sebelius testified before Congress and announced that Obamacare signups had reached 7.5 million people.

On Thursday evening, news broke that Sebelius was stepping down as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Maybe Sebelius and her supporters hoped that the morning news would put a more positive spin on the evening’s. If so, they were very, very wrong. The first sentence of the New York Times article on her resignation described a “stormy five-year tenure marred by the disastrous rollout of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act.” Expect more of the same in the coming hours and days.

Sebelius deserves at least some of that treatment. The technological failures of healthcare.gov during October and November—and the failure to anticipate a wave of private plan cancellations—represented low points for the cause of health care reform, the Obama presidency, and liberalism more generally. HHS was in charge of Obamacare implementation and Sebelius was in charge of HHS. In one of her many grueling sessions of congressional testimony, Sebelius said that critics should hold her accountable for those failures. They are now doing that—actually, they've been doing that for some time. That opening Times paragraph is what accountability sounds like.

Sebelius brought two main assets to her job. She had experience regulating insurers and, as a successful Democrat in Kansas, she knew how to work with Republicans. But what Obamacare needed more was a deft, aggressive manager. Case in point: By all accounts, Sebelius did not grasp the severity of tech problems at healthcare.gov until the day it went live and crashed. If she got the warnings, then she should have heeded them. If she didn't get the warnings, then she should have appointed people who would have kept her better informed. Either way, that's a serious management failure.