The Department of Veterans Affairs has just nine days to address a $15 billion budget shortfall, and failure to close the gap could leave millions of veterans without disability compensation and other benefits.
Since July, Congress has been informed that the VA will see a $3 billion shortfall for the rest of this year and a $12 billion shortfall in its budget for fiscal 2025.
Last Friday, members of the House Appropriations Committee shared a funding plan that would give the VA nearly $3 billion. The bill also includes “strong oversight measures to uncover how this massive shortfall occurred and to prevent it from happening again.”
If Congress does not approve the funding for the rest of this year, more than 5 million veterans could lose their benefits, which could lead to a partial government shutdown.
According to Jim Whaley, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, Congress must work fast to close the shortfall and put in safeguards to ensure this does not happen again.
“There's a lot of families that are at stake here,” Whaley told the Washington Examiner. “Their health is at stake. Livelihoods are at stake, and so this is an important issue that needs to be fixed, and then, not only fixed, but make sure we put the process together so that this doesn't happen every year. And people need to be held accountable for bad decisions and accountable for any mismanagement that may have occurred.”
Whaley is also the CEO of Mission Roll Call , a national veteran nonprofit organization.
The VA has pointed to the influx of benefit claims due to the 2022 PACT Act and a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare for the shortfall.
However, Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL), chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, said the VA should have been prepared for the changes that would come with the PACT Act and that the ransomware attack is just a “convenient excuse.”
“The lack of VA accountability is happening as VA has completely lost control of its budget and has IT projects ballooning by tens of billions of dollars,” Bost said during a hearing. “That includes the Digital G.I. Bill, Financial Management Business Transformation, and the electronic health record system.”
The VA’s Electronic Health Records Modernization program, which manages all the health records of veterans, is partnered with Oracle Cerner and reportedly deployed to be used at just six out of 160 sites.
It has a budget of $16 billion, but an audit conducted in 2022 reveals it actually exceeds $50 billion each year.
“This is a mistake that for 10 years money has been poured into, and you literally have less than 4 percent of the whole system on Cerner now, and its interoperability with other large systems is paltry,” Rep. Greg Murphy, (R-NC) said. “This is a huge problem, and why will the VA not recognize they screwed up 10 years ago and fix it today? It will cost an outlay of money, but it will actually deliver care to veterans that need it.”
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A report by the VA Office of Inspector General also found that poor planning by the Veterans Benefits Administration in its rollout of information technology modernization actually led to double the original contract cost.
“There's a number of great employees at the VA that are trying every day to make lives better for veterans, but it's clearly a mismanagement at some level when you're off this amount of money,” Whaley said.
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