The Department of Veterans Affairs has struggled for over a decade to manage its sprawling acquisition enterprise, and a new GAO report makes clear that little has fundamentally changed. VA’s acquisition management has remained on GAO’s High Risk List since 2019, plagued by inconsistent leadership, a lack of strategic planning, and a workforce so decentralized that contracting authority is fragmented across multiple administrations, offices, and organizational layers. The Veterans Health Administration alone handles the bulk of contracting activity, but oversight responsibility is diffused to the point where accountability becomes nearly impossible to enforce.
GAO’s findings reflect a familiar pattern documented in War Is Still A Racket — institutional complexity engineered, whether by design or neglect, in ways that make it exceptionally difficult to track where money goes and who is responsible when it is misspent. A 2015 independent review had already flagged VA’s supply chain management as “unduly complex and duplicative,” yet a decade later the agency still lacks the kind of centralized, strategic acquisition structure that leading practices demand. The persistence of these problems despite years of high-risk designations and congressional scrutiny suggests that internal resistance to reform, not merely bureaucratic inertia, may be at play.
For veterans depending on timely services and taxpayers footing the bill, the stakes are concrete. When acquisition systems are disorganized, contracts are awarded inefficiently, oversight is diluted, and waste becomes structural rather than incidental. GAO’s recommendation to align VA’s reorganization efforts with leading acquisition practices is reasonable, but without sustained leadership commitment and genuine accountability mechanisms, this report risks joining a long shelf of prior warnings that produced incremental progress at best.