MAY 23, 2015
DENVER, COLORADO
A project dubbed the "biggest construction
failure" in the history of the Department of Veterans
Affairs -- already $1 billion over budget and more than a year behind
schedule -- is getting another $100 million taxpayer bailout.
Construction will continue on a new veterans medical center
near Denver, expected to serve 400,000 former military service members and their
families. Ahead of Memorial Day,
contractors had prepared to stop work on the project as approved funding dried
up after repeated overruns and delays.
The Republican-led Congress approved the cash infusion this
week before leaving Washington, D.C., for the holiday; President Obama on
Saturday morning signed on the dotted line.
The fix is only a stop-gap measure: The $100 million funds
just three more weeks of work.
"I am pleased that Congress has taken action to ensure
that construction at the site of the Denver Replacement Medical Center will
continue," VA Secretary Robert McDonald said in a statement. "I look
forward to working with Congress in the coming weeks to determine a path
forward to finishing the campus."
The costs to taxpayers for the project have already
ballooned from an initial $328 million price tag in 2005 to $1.73 billion, with
years more construction to go, according to government watchdog groups.
House Veterans' Affairs Committee chairman Jeff Miller,
R-Fla., has called the agency's entire construction program "a
disaster" and the Denver project its "biggest construction failure."
Congress had imposed an $880 million spending cap on the
program, but the agency has repeatedly lobbied lawmakers to lift the cap and
provide more funds.
VA Secretary Robert
McDonald was hailed during his appointment last year as a fiscal hawk and
seasoned manager, a former CEO of Proctor & Gamble, who would restore
efficiency to the nation's largest federal agency.
But the Denver project, which was a boondoggle before he
arrived at the agency, has remained an embarrassment. He has said the
"mistakes" were "made years ago by VA officials" who
preceded him.
Government watchdog Citizens Against Government Waste named
McDonald "porker of the month" for his role in not resolving cost
overruns and continuing to ask Congress for more funds.
A recent Government Accountability Office report cited several
factors behind the ballooning price tag, including "changes to veterans'
health care needs, site-acquisition issues, and a decision in Denver to change
plans from a medical center shared with a local medical university to a standalone
VA medical center.”
Sucking that big government tit. How sweet it is, indeed.
Of course we know that most people on the government payroll are crooks or incompetent. They keep raising the public debt to $18 trillions of dollars and more and we will eventually capitulate. If the people complain about the incompetence of the government and about the tax bill, then they attack the citizens, they seize their livelihoods, they humiliate them, create military police, spies and illegal wiretapping everywhere, trillion dollar wars, and so on. The same thing that the British used to do the colonists; we all know how that turned out to be.