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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nLawmakers reached a short-term deal May 21 to avert a work stoppage on a troubled veterans hospital in Aurora, Colo., seen here in a drawing.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo Credit: Department of Veterans Affairs<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The VA has said it needs another $830 million to finish the project as designed. Hoping to appease Congress, the department offered to indefinitely delay a nursing home and a post-traumatic stress disorder clinic planned for the campus, saving about $55 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The VA wants to finish the project with money siphoned from a $5 billion fund Congress set up to resolve an embarrassing national scandal, long wait times for veterans to get health care. Republicans and Democrats balked, saying the VA needed to come up with a different funding plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Veterans elsewhere cannot be forced to sacrifice just because of the catastrophe here,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said during a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing in Aurora last month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coffman suggested diverting the VA’s multimillion-dollar bonus budget to the Denver hospital. VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson called that “a lousy idea.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reasons the hospital costs escalated so sharply have yet to be fully explained. The VA has said the plans weren’t complete when work began, and VA construction executives tried to switch to a different type of design-and-build process too late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At least two internal VA investigations are underway, and the department says all the key executives on the project have been replaced \u2014 some were demoted or transferred, and another retired one day after investigators interviewed him under oath. But no one has been fired, angering many in Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Veterans are worried and feel caught in the middle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I know the VA’s done a lot of bad things, and we’re outraged over that,” said Steven Rylant, president of the United Veterans Committee of Colorado, a coalition of veterans groups. “But making them accountable shouldn’t keep us from getting a new veterans hospital.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Veterans Affairs Department averted a costly construction shutdown at its half-finished hospital outside Denver on Thursday, but it still has to persuade an angry Congress to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars more to complete the troubled project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":39204,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":68,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[12,68],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1719],"class_list":["post-42620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-pentagon-congress"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"CBXGSJOWEVGDRHQT7XO55V4WHQ","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/pentagon-congress\/2015\/05\/21\/va-averts-construction-shutdown-at-troubled-denver-hospital\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n