The flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act has endangered another of President Barack Obama’s top agenda items: Immigration reform.

It’s forcing the White House and its allies to confront a basic, but politically potent, criticism. If the government can’t build a website, how can it be trusted to correctly process millions of undocumented immigrants and require every employer to verify the status of their workers?

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The Obamacare struggles and the government shutdown sidetracked White House plans for a fall immigration campaign. And House Republicans have been able to avoid a major political hit for sitting on the Senate-passed bill in part due to their ability to draw attention to Obama’s broken promises on health care.

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Coming into 2013, immigration reform looked promising — Obama and Democrats were pushing ahead, and Republicans wanted to move on after losing the Hispanic vote. But the legislation remains stalled in the House, where Speaker John Boehner has claimed immigration reform is “absolutely not” dead but has yet to say when it would come to the floor.

That the public may be more skeptical of the federal government’s capacity to run big programs effectively and efficiently is something conservatives will surely hold up as a reason not to expand the government’s footprint well into the future — setting up another hurdle for reform advocates to clear.

“There’s a loss of confidence in the government’s ability,” former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat who backs the immigration bill, said at an event sponsored by the public relations firm Edelman this month. “Clearly, the last few months, our experience with Affordable Care Act does not help when you look at other big things like immigration reform.”

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The Senate bill would beef up border enforcement, expand the nation’s temporary worker program, and create legalization pathways for the estimated 11 million people who are in the country illegally. That may be now too much for Congress to handle, said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), both a lead co-sponsor of the Senate bill and leading Obamacare critic.

“It’s going to make it harder to sell big deals,” Graham said. “People are now saying, ‘So you’re gonna do immigration. You’re gonna let the same people manage the immigration system that’s managed Obamacare?’”

Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said the rocky Obamacare rollout “validated our warnings against jamming one massive bill that few have read and even fewer fully comprehend.”

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“If the Obamacare train wreck has any lesson,” Buck said, “it’s that big policy challenges should be addressed deliberatively and one step at a time.”

Still, President Barack Obama and his allies have yet to adjust their strategy to fit a new reality that politicians on both the right and the left say has taken hold in the debate.

“If people are looking for an excuse not to do the right thing on immigration reform, they can always find an excuse — we’ve run out of time, or this is hard, or the list goes on and on,” Obama said at a news conference last month. “But my working assumption is people should want to do the right thing.”

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His press secretary, Jay Carney, said the real comparison is in the public benefit of Obamacare and immigration.

“These are different systems,” Carney said Monday. “I would point to the extraordinary effort that’s gone into fixing the problems on HealthCare.gov, acknowledging the shortcomings — the serious, significant shortcomings, taking ownership and responsibility for them and acting to fix the problem. Because in the end — and this would be true of immigration reform as it is of HealthCare.gov or the ACA — the issue isn’t in the end how the process is; the process is performed in service of the legislation and the goal. And in this case, in immigration reform, it’s in service of a bill that would provide, when implemented, the benefits that we’ve described and that outside analysts have described.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said his private conversations with Republicans, as well as Boehner’s strike against tea party groups last week over the budget, make him believe that prospects for passage are brightening. Boehner’s recent hire of Rebecca Tallent, a former immigration aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has also fueled speculation that he’s preparing to make a move on immigration next year, possibly after the Republican primary season.

“I think the chances for immigration reform over the last month or two have only gotten better,” Schumer said.

But the clear danger is that conservative Republicans will make it politically difficult for their moderate counterparts to vote for a federal overhaul of the immigration system by raising the Obamacare experience. The ACA is now Exhibit A — a tangible item of evidence — in the argument.