The House Veterans Affairs Committee plans to subpoena Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison and CEO Mike Sicilia to compel them to testify over its $16.9 billion increase to the Veterans Affairs Department’s electronic health systems contract.
The committee unanimously agreed to the motion presented by Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) after Oracle pulled out of today’s oversight hearing.
“[T]here are plenty of red flags to raise concern. A $17 billion no-bid contract extension has been given to a company that our President invests in, whose founder has contributed heavily to our President, and that company has a terrible record of past performance using taxpayer dollars. That’s why we need to investigate,” Dexter said during the hearing. “We are here because we care about the same thing: Making sure veterans receive the care they were promised, and making sure taxpayers get what they are paying for. When the vendor responsible for a taxpayer-funded contract going from $10 billion to roughly $27 billion will not sit at this table and answer our questions, all of us are being prevented from doing our oversight duties. I agree with my colleague, Congressman Van Orden, that this sounds like it could be corruption. Oracle has still not provided a complete and comprehensive cost estimate for this contract, and it is not sufficiently documented that the additional funds already committed are being used effectively. A closed door private roundtable cannot replace congressional oversight that happens here in this hearing room. Oracle needs to appear before this committee in this room in a formal setting to answer our questions.”
The motion to subpoena comes after Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), ranking member of the committee, invited Oracle to testify on Aug. 20. The company accepted the invitation on Aug. 26, only to withdraw a day later citing “time constraints and the two panel structure.”
“On Aug. 28, I sent a letter to Oracle telling them that their refusal to appear was not acceptable, and finally on Aug. 31, Oracle responded in a letter reiterating their refusal to appear,” Takano said. “Oracle must appear publicly before this committee to answer for its performance and how the additional billions of dollars it will receive will benefit veterans. Now, here’s this other poster here, and now I want to want you to pay attention. This is a testimony or a statement by Michael Cecilia, the CEO of Oracle Health, and you know something is wrong here. What he says here is, well, ‘Congress needs to act and start by asking questions of both VA and Oracle about this program’. When Oracle testified before this committee in June of 2022, its chief executive officer told us something different than what we’re hearing or seeing now. As you can see in this excerpt, he said that if there were cost overruns, Oracle was ‘prepared to bear those costs.’ Oracle was prepared to bear those costs if there were cost overruns. What has changed? Why does Oracle need $17 billion more to get the job done when this program has already dragged on for eight years? These things do not add up. We need answers and not excuses.”
Emails to Oracle seeking comment on the decision not to testify as well as Cecilia’s pledge to bear the costs of any overruns were not returned.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle focused on VA’s extension of the electronic health records management contract with Oracle back in August, which could be up to three more years and worth as much as $16.9 billion.
Committee members questioned VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence and Dr. Neil Evans, program executive director of VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization Integrations Office, over and over again about the extension given to Oracle and the current state of the program.
Records profits for Oracle
Lawrence had few answers that satisfied lawmakers, especially around why VA hasn’t provided the committee with a full lifecycle cost estimate and why the total cost of the program ballooned to $47 billion.
Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-Texas) asked Lawrence for more details about the conversation VA had with Oracle about why another $17 billion was needed.
“I cannot give you that information,” Lawrence said.
Evans also said he was not involved with the initial discussions on price.
“We got a crew in front of us that can’t explain to Congress why we bumped up $17 billion on a contract that initially was supposed to cost $10 billion,” Luttrell said. “Congress gave [VA] $10 billion and Oracle to get this project completed, and then it went into a freeze, and then we’re an increase of $17 billion. But I’d like to submit something for the record from investor.oracle.com. It says Oracle announces record Q4 fiscal 2026 results driven by cloud infrastructure and cloud applications. The net profit for 2026 was $17 billion. Record remaining performance obligations grew of $85 billion in Q4. Record Q4 earnings per share went up 21 percent. Record Q4 totals revenue was $19 billion. Record Q4 total cloud revenue was $9.9 billion. So my question is, if the CEO of Oracle said that they were willing to eat the cost on the EHRM contract why is the taxpayer spending an extra $17 billion?”
Lawrence said the $17 billion wasn’t necessarily all going to Oracle. He said VA asked for a proposal from Oracle for what full deployment would cost through 2031.
“Of that, some … of it is for the services that Oracle provides software as well as some training and some other things,” Lawrence said. “The ceiling for their [current] contract was expiring. We would have no legal document to do business with them without extending the ceiling of their contract.”
He added because the contract is a time and materials (T&M), each task will be negotiated and the $17 billion is the maximum VA would spend, but it’s not guaranteed.
Lawrence said the entire roll out of the EHRM and sustainment would cost $48 billion. He said also he doesn’t believe VA will need to come back to Congress to ask for more money for the program.
“The contract extension and the ceiling modification reflect us hitting the ceiling and the costs we predicted in the documents we gave you last year,” Lawrence said in response to a question from Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.), committee chairman.
Integrated master schedule coming soon
Bost also asked if Lawrence was confident that the $17 billion would be enough to finish the roll out of the EHRM program.
“I’m very confident,” Lawrence said. “What I can tell you since I showed up at the end of March, we have spent exactly the money you have allowed us. We have deployed in the schedule exactly as we said we would. We have had serious conversations with our contractors that this is the money available to do the things we need to do. The Secretary has been very clear about the importance of this mission. I’m very confident that is the money we need.”
Bost, other lawmakers and the Government Accountability Office all said VA still needs to provide a lifecycle cost estimate to include the program’s historical cost, its full operating and sustained cost and an assessment of future risk.
Evans said VA gave GAO and lawmakers last September a master schedule for deployments through 2031.
“The questions are around the integrated master schedule. That is, what is happening every week, every day between now and then from a deployment schedule. We have the integrated master schedule for all of the 26 sites in the 11 active waves where we’re currently deploying, and are building out the full integrated master schedule, and anticipate demonstrating those dashboards and providing a view to the GAO of that within the next month or two,” he said.
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