A construction company building a hospital for the Veterans Affairs Department near Denver has refused to work on the project any longer, saying the VA is in breach of its contract.
The Civilian Board of Contract Appeals at the General Services Administration agreed Tuesday that the VA has failed to pay the company, Kiewit-Turner, or provide it with viable blueprints.
The company said it is out $100 million of its own money that it spent to pay subcontractors and employees, and said the VA has not acted in “good faith.”
In a statement to 9NEWS in Denver, the VA said it was “exploring alternatives” after the company canceled the contract.
Led by Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., the House has passed a bill to order the Army Corps of Engineers manage construction for VA, which Coffman said is “clearly” unable to handle it by itself. The Aurora, Colo., hospital is a year behind schedule and $400 million over budget.
In fact, every one of VA’s major construction projects is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and behind schedule, according to independent audits by the Government Accountability Office.
Its new Las Vegas facility is $260 million over its construction budget. Its Orlando hospital is $362 million over budget. And its New Orleans project is $370 million in the red, according to GAO.
Glenn Haggstrom, director of VA’s Office of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction, said he would learn from the earlier failures, yet they continue to happen.
Despite the failures, Haggstrom has received $20,000 a year in civil service performance bonuses on top of his $180,000 annual salary.
Asked by Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., why he earned the bonuses, Haggstrom declined to say whether he thought he deserved them or to identify what aspect of his performance his supervisors were rewarding.
“These bonuses were not determined by myself, those bonuses were determined by my supervisors,” he said.
“Do you believe you deserved these bonuses?” Huelskamp asked.
“Congressman, I believe I’ve answered your question,” Haggstrom said.
Legislation passed in August made it easier for the VA to fire high-level employees without endless appeals. But the agency has been reluctant to use its authority, firing only one person as of October after inquiries that focused on a wait-list scandal that led to patient deaths.
Congressional Republicans say the VA appears to be reacting to incidents that attract media scrutiny without internalizing the message that it must not just stop rewarding failure with bonuses, but purge all of its programs of bad ideas and the staffers who backed them.
Of 8,000 senior executives across the federal government, only five were fired in 2012, seven in 2013 and none in the first half of 2014, according to the Office of Personnel Management, and the number of federal employees of any rank fired for poor performance has declined every year since President Obama took office.
