Miller to VA: Agency has ‘a management issue far more than … a money issue.’
6/25/2015
Miller to VA: Agency has ‘a management issue far more than … a money issue.’
By Emily Wax-Thibodeaux June 25 at 12:58 PM
Despite a tense hearing, a House oversight committee said it will give the Department of Veterans Affairs more “flexibility,” to help ease a $2.5 billion budget shortfall the agency said it is facing to treat millions of former troops.
Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., said the House should help instead of “pointing fingers and assigning blame.”
VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson called his troubled agency’s lack of planning for an anticipated $2.5 billion budget shortfall “inexcusable” during a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing on the cash-strapped department’s request to use funds set up to help lower wait-times.
Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said the current budget woes, “proves to me once again that VA’s current problems reflect a management issue far more than they represent a money issue.”
“This Committee cannot help VA solve its problems, if VA refuses to be honest, upfront, and transparent with us and with the American people about the position it is in, the struggles it is facing, and the help that it needs,” Miller said.
But he agreed to, “work with my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee to give VA the flexibility it is seeking to use a limited amount of Choice funds for non-VA care and ensure that no veteran suffers as a result of VA’s mismanagement of the generous budget the American taxpayers have provided.”
Gibson said that the VA saw a 10.5 percent increase in workload for the 12-month period, which ended in April.
He called it “an untenable situation” in which demand for health care – for returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan and increased demands for expensive and new Hepatitis C treatments – far exceeds resources.
The budget shortfall is the most recent crisis for the embattled department after it attempted to emerge from the worst scandals in its history last summer. Last year, it was revealed that health-care staff across the country had fudged patient appointment data to hide long delays in treatment for veterans seeking urgent care for everything from cancer to post-traumatic stress disorder.
After the scandal, Congress gave the agency $16.3 billion in funding. Included in that money was $10 billion for the Veterans Choice program, which provides outside care to veterans who cannot get an appointment at their local VA within 30 days or who live too far away.
Earlier this year, VA Secretary Bob McDonald proposed diverting money from the Veterans Choice program and elsewhere to pay for the most expensive project in the VA’s history: a $1.7 billion VA hospital, replete with massive planning mistakes and cost overruns. The department is now asking for additional funds from the choice program, a request that angers Republicans who say that the VA is slow to send care outside its system.
[One year after scandal, wait-times are up. Again.]
In a statement, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Congress has given billions to the department in just the past year. And increased its budget every year for 14 years.
McCain said the latest request shows how dysfunctional the department is and that it can’t seem to manage money.
“Congress has approved every budget increase for the VA since 9/11 – in many cases going above and beyond increases requested by the VA – and yet the department continues to tell us how it is short of funding,” McCain said in a statement.
Emily Wax-Thibodeaux is a National staff writer who covers veterans, veterans' affairs and the culture of government. She's an award-winning former foreign correspondent who covered Africa and India for nearly a decade. She also covered immigration, crime and education for the Metro staff.
