Congress has pulled off its final 11th-hour rescue of the new VA hospital in Aurora and while the plan isn’t perfect — this is Congress, after all — it’s a pretty good long-term solution.
For one thing, the additional $625 million needed to complete the $1.67 billion facility would come from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ own budget. Or at least the bulk of it would. We’ll return to that matter in a minute.
Republican leaders were rightly determined that the extra cost of the VA fiasco not simply be foisted onto taxpayers in the form of additional deficit spending. And for the most part they succeeded.
The other crucial aspect of the funding plan — and Wednesday in the House — is that it bars the VA from managing any project over $100 million. Such projects would be led by the Army Corps of Engineers.
While cost overruns on the Aurora hospital reached eye-popping levels, that project was unique only in the magnitude of mismanagement. Cost overruns have bedeviled other VA projects, too. So it is only proper that Congress respond by reducing the agency’s construction authority.
To be sure, some House members, including the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, still consider a portion of the VA’s plan for the hospital to involve fuzzy math. That’s why Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., this week proposed $200 million of the $625 million come from internal VA awards and bonuses (which totaled $400 million annually not long ago).
As policy, Miller’s proposal makes sense — and echoes an idea that Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., pushed earlier this year and which we supported. Unfortunately, the plan would have been a deal-breaker for some members, as Coffman himself concluded.
And as Coffman reminded us Tuesday, mothballing the project and then reviving it would have been extremely expensive.
A deal had to be reached to achieve the overriding goal of finishing a much-needed facility. And the urgency was such that Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner personally lobbied House Republican leadership on behalf of the bill. Now, at last, both the House and Senate — with major contributions not only from Gardner and Coffman but Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., and Sen. Michael Bennet as well — have achieved that goal.
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