> Today, the VA spends more than half of its $4.3 billion IT budget on maintaining increasingly archaic legacy systems.

Not difficult to see how they’d claim their Great New Thing would cost less to maintain than the Really Old Thing that nobody likes which was built by someone else.

> employees were shunning another troubled IT program, called Catamaran, that manages supplies through predictive analytics

> employees complained of frequent crashes that made it difficult to order supplies

Also, if they stopped infecting people with Hepatitis and HIV (most likely among other things) due to using dirty equipment they would realise savings through not having to pay compensation and/or treat those people for the rest of their lives. That could also be done by following proper cleanliness procedures but that would require some leadership to achieve.