A regarding its 2016 budget request notes that “total VA funding has grown by nearly 73 percent from 2009.”
A huge increase, in other words. And yet the funding still isn’t enough — if you believe the VA — for the agency to find savings to cover a substantial portion of colossal cost overruns at the Aurora medical complex. And never mind that bonuses alone at the VA totaled $400 million last year.
Meanwhile, those cost overruns now appear destined to result in a shutdown of construction as soon as this weekend. It’s the worst possible outcome for the project.
Originally, the VA suggested finding the needed money by dipping into a $5 billion fund established by Congress to make the agency more efficient. But key politicians resisted that solution, so this week the VA offered a temporary fix designed to keep work on the project going into summer.
Unfortunately, House Speaker John Boehner rejected the idea, according to U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., because it failed to cut the cost of the project enough and because it would leave too much funding unidentified.
Much as we count ourselves among those insisting that the hospital be completed — “We need to finish the damn thing,” is how Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., succinctly put it this week — we understand Boehner’s point. The stopgap plan was hardly ideal, not least because it left the agency hundreds of millions of dollars shy of what it ultimately needs. And no one seems to know where that money will come from.
But the plan also represented real progress in terms of the VA scaling back the project. As outlined by VA Secretary Robert McDonald, the agency proposed eliminating — at least for the time being — a community living center and a post-traumatic stress disorder residential clinic at the complex. He also said the VA would use $150 million in “unobligated balances” from other accounts on the Aurora facility.
Boehner’s concerns notwithstanding, it would be a terrible mistake to allow construction to stop since it would significantly jack up the cost of the facility while delaying again its eventual opening. After all, it’s inconceivable — isn’t it? — that Congress and the VA will not find some way even after a shutdown to finish the facility rather than mothball it for good and thus leave veterans in the lurch.
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