VA's $10bn health record program is heading past $48bn — Oracle's chiefs subpoenaed

In 2018 the Department of Veterans Affairs awarded Cerner a contract with a ceiling of roughly $10 billion over 10 years to replace its aging VistA record system and create a common electronic health record with the Department of Defense. Oracle bought Cerner in 2022. The first clinical go-lives were so troubled — patients' referrals canceled, clinicians unable to document care for weeks — that VA paused almost all new deployments in April 2023, at which point the system was live in just five clinical settings.

Deployments restarted in 2026 and reached 11 facilities that year, with VA planning 26 more go-lives in 2027 and a final cutover in 2031. In September 2026, as VA moved to raise the contract ceiling by about $17 billion — from roughly $10 billion to roughly $27 billion — the House Veterans' Affairs Committee held a hearing at which VA's own officials could not explain what Oracle's proposal covered, how much VA had negotiated it down, or what specifically drove the added cost.

The committee noted that in 2022 Oracle Health CEO Mike Sicilia had said the company was prepared to bear the program's cost overruns. VA's broader estimate — about $37 billion to complete deployment plus $11 billion to sustain — puts total cost near $48 billion, nearly five times the 2018 price. The contract is time-and-materials: VA had 'hit the ceiling as planned', but hitting a ceiling is not a delivery plan.

Contract ceiling up from ~$10bn to ~$27bn; VA's own estimate now ~$37bn to finish deploying plus $11bn to sustain the system

The 2018 award priced a never-before-deployed system for the largest integrated health network in the US at a round $10 billion, a baseline no one tested against the work actually involved.

Early rollouts produced canceled referrals — about 300 dermatology patients at one facility, including cancer diagnoses — forcing a 2023 pause that consumed years on rework.

The time-and-materials structure means every complexity from earlier phases becomes billable work: the vendor has no financial reason to make the later sites cheap.

Oversight was reactive: VA's chief official at the hearing could not say why Oracle's proposal came to $17 billion or what VA negotiated away, and Oracle declined to testify until subpoenaed.

A decades-long replacement priced as time-and-materials gives the vendor no reason to finish cheap: once the legacy system is retired mid-program, the ceiling only moves up.

On 2 September 2026 the House Veterans' Affairs Committee voted 19-0 to subpoena Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and CEO Mike Sicilia after the company declined an invitation to testify, seeking answers on the cost and status of the program. VA says it remains confident it can finish the remaining deployments within the new ceiling by 2031. Lawmakers are pressing VA to retrieve whatever cost-overrun commitments Oracle made in 2022. Deployments continue, but each additional go-live now lands on a program whose published cost estimate has nearly quintupled since award.