WASHINGTON — Bipartisan congressional leadership is asking that the VA halt its plans to adopt the Defense Logistics Agency’s (DLA’s) supply chain management system.
The letter was sent at the end of January to VA Secretary Denis McDonough by the leaders of the Senate and House Veterans’ Affairs Committees. They were responding to a VA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report finding that the pilot project testing the system was failing to meet approximately 44% of VA’s high-priority needs.
The legislators cited the evidence provided by the OIG as proof that the multibillion-dollar project is not only incapable of meeting VA’s needs but that it is more expensive than other potentially more capable systems.
VA began the process of adopting the Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support (DMLSS) system in 2019, with the expectation that the implementation would cost $2.2 billion over the next 15 years. In 2020, a pilot project went live at the James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in Chicago, which is the only medical center shared by DoD and VA.
Subsequent evaluations have found that DMLSS failed to communicate properly with other VA systems, requiring VA staff to adopt time-consuming workarounds. This, combined with court rulings that have halted VA’s elimination of its current prime vendor program, had legislators wondering months ago why VA was still attempting to move forward with DMLSS.
During a hearing in November, VA officials said they were committed to the project and were still planning to continue forward. More recently, VA officials have softened that language, suggesting they are more willing to abandon the project.
“We have an opportunity [with DMLSS] to be state of the art in terms of how we manage our supply chain. I believe everybody in the organization believes that,” said VA Chief Information Officer Kurt DelBene at a joint hearing of the House VA Oversight and IT Infrastructure Modernization Subcommittees last month. “There are obvious possibilities, if it’s possible, to share the solutions across DoD and VA. … But rightly so, our chief acquisitions officer has said we should step back and look at what the different options are that are available to us to make sure we’re making a conscious decision based on the requirements of the program and end up with the best solution. We’re looking deeply at how DMLSS looks and we’re also looking at other commercial solutions that are available.”
Adequate Supplies
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) added VA’s acquisition management to its high-risk list in 2019. The watchdog organization has subsequently found that VA’s acquisition and supply chain management weaknesses were responsible for much of the department’s struggles in the early months of the pandemic to adequately supply its facilities.
At the joint subcommittee hearing, lawmakers used the opportunity to voice general concerns about VA’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) and to grill DelBene, who was confirmed to the CIO position in December, on his initial thoughts about VA’s struggles with IT projects.
“When I look at OIT, I see an organization with sensible priorities but intractable bureaucratic barriers,” declared Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT). “Great talent but widespread struggles to recruit and retain employees. I see a budget process that consistently fails to reflect your needs. I see boom-and-bust cycles of lavish spending followed by painful cuts. Above all else, I see an organization that’s always struggling to catch up. VA is continually growing and creating new IT requirements faster than your predecessors can manage them.”
“During our oversight hearings, when we look at the department’s many challenges, we often hear the root cause is IT,” added Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NJ). “The solution is usually modernizing these systems, [because] technology is years or decades out of date. And then we always hear IT projects are behind schedule, sometimes many years behind schedule, and the major headaches and financial losses continue, which can affect veterans.”
Asked if, during his decades as an executive at Microsoft he had ever seen an organization juggle as many major IT projects as VA is attempting to, DelBene said it was hard to make a one-to-one comparison but that VA’s slate of projects was ambitious.
“This is a lot of programs to be running at the same time, I will say that,” he admitted. “It requires a lot of coordination … and it requires a lot of focus. It requires proper resourcing. And the kind of critical path management to make sure the right decisions are made at the right time. But it’s a lot of change in a narrow period of time.”