Veterans Affairs Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson told congressional overseers Wednesday that he didn’t see how VA could have handled the construction of a Denver hospital any worse, after it hired a company to build a hospital at a fixed price before it had even finished designing it.
But even as VA officials admitted fault, saying the department’s performance on the Denver project was “embarrassing” and they were open to all alternatives, including having the Army Corps of Engineers build all future veterans hospitals, the top Democrat on the House panel defended the government’s conduct.
Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., said members of Congress shouldn’t ask certain tough questions because of an ongoing lawsuit. “There is a lawsuit against the VA, and so a lawsuit against us,” she said.
Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs committee, reminded her that “the VA is part of the administration, not Congress.”
Later, Brown employed the opposite tack, saying that VA was part of the administration so only it should get into the details of its broken contracting operation.
“The secretary needs to have the authority to decide what’s in the best interest of the VA … we have been part of the problem. We don’t need to get into the business of change orders, if so we need to go to the administration,” she said, referring to congressional oversight and questions about contract modifications.
Though VA blamed problems on the contractor in an April 2014 hearing, it took responsibility Wednesday, acknowledging that the agency had significantly changed plans after awarding the contract, leaving the contractor expected to build something for which it wasn’t being paid.
But Brown continued to fault the contractor, Kiewit-Turner. “I spent three hours with the agency but also three hours with the contractor. It is not just one agency that’s at fault.”
Brown has served on the committee for 22 years. “Hard work and perseverance,” she said of her rise to ranking member at the beginning of the hearing, the committee’s first in the new Congress.
Congress was questioning VA’s construction management after all of its new hospitals fell behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget, while the head of the department’s construction division has gotten bonuses every year of up to $20,000.
The Denver hospital project is years behind schedule, and the contractor stopped work after an impartial group ruled that VA had violated its contract. VA worked out an interim plan to pay it more money to keep working, but the project could cost half a billion dollars more than anticipated.
The facility was originally slated in 2005 to cost $328 million, but design changes by VA resulted in Congress increasing funding to $568 million. Just two years later, Congress again hiked the funding total, this time to $800 million.
“This is a FUBAR if there’s ever been one … I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone,” said Rep. David Roe, R-Tenn., a medical doctor. “I’m not sure after hearing all this that the VA should ever build a hospital … I’ve been in practice for 40 years. Building an operating room is building an operating room.”
Gibson said that despite the half-billion dollar boondoggle, he couldn’t give any timetable on how long it might take to hold anyone accountable, and that if he attempted to fire anyone without having enough documentation, union rules and petitioning boards would just reinstate them.
“The evidence has to withstand scrutiny on appeal,” he said.
On Tuesday, the Washington Examiner exclusively reported that the office of the VA that handles contracting and construction had systematically altered dates on contracting documents to game metrics reviewed by headquarters
Despite the majority of contracts having problems and many being far overdue, nearly every division of the contracting office got the highest rating for timeliness. The VA had also been warned about many of the problems in 2011, yet taken no action by 2013.
Gibson had little in the way of satisfying answers for members of Congress.
“I’m betting everyone is wondering what it will take to finish the project. Right now we don’t know and the Corps doesn’t know.”
