U.S. Senator Jerry Moran has blasted a proposal sent to Congress by the Department of Veterans Affairs requesting that funds from the Veterans Access Choice and Accountability Act of 2014 be used to pay for the ballooning price tag to complete a new VA medical center being built in Aurora, Colorado.

“Choice Act is not a cookie jar for the VA to raid as it sees fit,” Sen. Moran said. “If the President is truly focused on fixing the VA, why is his administration proposing to raid emergency funds provided by Congress to support greater access to health care for veterans? The over-budget and behind-schedule Denver project is a catastrophic failure of VA’s own making. While we cannot allow the millions of taxpayer dollars already spent on the facility to go to waste I cannot sit by and watch emergency funds intended to make VA medical facilities nationwide more efficient and hire desperately-needed physicians and medical staff be used to clean up this mess. Thousands of rural veterans in states like Kansas still can’t get the timely VA care the Choice Act promised and are being forced to travel long distances to VA hospitals.”

“This request is just one more piece of evidence of the VA’s unwillingness and lack of interest in implementing the Choice Act,” Sen. Moran concluded.

The VA request came in a legislative proposal from VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson to the Senate on Tuesday afternoon regarding VA construction initiatives. Section 8 of the proposal would amend the Choice Act authorization to add the Denver construction project so that nearly $1 billion in Choice Act funds could be used for the completion of the Aurora medical facility. The Denver project is more than five times over budget and expected to cost a staggering $1.73 billion once complete. Its original cost estimate was $328 million.