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Today, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), the Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization, delivered the following opening remarks, as prepared, at the start of the subcommittee’s final oversight hearing of this Congress entitled, “Modernizing VA: Lessons Learned in the 118th Congress:”

Good morning.

The Subcommittee will come to order.

I want to welcome our witnesses to discuss the lessons we can learn from VA’s efforts to modernize its technology during the last two years.

VA is an organization of nearly a half-million people that serves 9 million veterans and their family members using thousands of IT systems—and has a total budget of roughly $370 billion a year, making it the second largest agency, only being surpassed by DoD.

The scale of the IT systems are massive, and it presents a lot of challenges.

The Department has repeatedly attempted to address these challenges with megaprojects that span years or decades and cost billions of dollars.

This strategy simply has not worked well.

All six of VA’s multi-billion-dollar I.T. projects have either stumbled badly or collapsed altogether.

And this should come as no surprise. I challenge our witnesses to point to any IT project, anywhere with a budget this large that has been successful.

We have spent many hours in this Subcommittee discussing VA’s three megaprojects that are currently racking up cost overruns and schedule delays.

Electronic Health Record Modernization has spent nearly $10 billion already and would cost more than $37 billion to implement according to the Institute for Defense Analysis.

And the true cost across VA is even higher than that, as it doesn’t include the enormous additional staffing requirements or loss in productivity.

VA and Oracle are on the cusp of resuming the rollout, and there is no end in sight.

After six years, Financial Management Business Transformation has only installed the Momentum system in a few small corners of VA, and its cost estimate has more than doubled to $5.8 billion according to IDA.

Finally, the Digital G.I. Bill has missed its original 2024 completion date, and its final price tag will likely double as well.

Not only have these systems blown past their schedules and budgets, they are also all struggling to live up to users’ expectations.

However, there are signs that VA’s leaders are learning to take different approaches.

Secretary McDonough had the good sense to pull the plug on the Dimels system after its pilot at James A. Lovell went poorly.

The second supply chain effort has been on indefinite hold since the Subcommittee exposed its poorly defined objectives and more than $9 billion lifecycle cost estimate.

Finally, Secretary McDonough, Mr. DelBene, and their teams came to their senses before moving forward with a nearly one-billion-dollar human capital management modernization contract.

I’m glad to see some at VA resist the contractors’ expensive promises and the temptation to use major IT projects to build their bureaucratic empires.

Megaprojects sound good in theory.

But in reality, they’re always overdue and over budget, and that’s unacceptable for veterans and taxpayers.

At a time when VA has come to us with a more than $6 billion budget deficit, the Department literally cannot afford to operate this way anymore.

Megaprojects are also incompatible with the best practices that took hold in the software industry more than a decade ago.

I’m talking about agile, incremental development, small-scale deployments, testing by real users, and component-based architecture.

We’re going to hear about the successful use of these practices from our panel of independent experts, and hopefully from our VA witnesses too.

We have also seen some encouraging examples, when VA succeeded in implementing or solving problems with smaller systems.

VA.gov was riddled with bugs causing veterans’ submissions to disappear, and I still question how long it took for the Department to tell us everything.

But Mr. DelBene and his office were able to get to the root cause of the problems fairly quickly.

There was also the 18-month ordeal to get the Program Integrity Tool to process claims data correctly.

But the system is small enough that OIT was eventually able to figure it out.

And Mr. Orifici and his team recognized the limitations in the large, outdated Veterans Benefits Management System, and they have been proactively segmenting it and modernizing its individual parts.

As with most things in government, the larger a project gets, the harder it is to manage and the less likely it is to ever deliver useful capability.

On the other hand, smaller efforts deliver early and often, and they can survive technical challenges along the way.

As we close out this Congress and prepare to transition to a new administration with new VA leadership, I want to emphasize these lessons learned.

We need to build a nimbler VA that’s more responsive to veterans’ needs.

I look forward to our witnesses’ testimony today to help us do that.

With that, I yield to Ranking Member Cherfilus-McCormick for her opening statement.