75,000 Military Families Were Denied Their Promised Benefits. The Digital GI Bill Is a Memorial Day Disgrace.

Memorial Day asks Americans to remember what the country owes the people who serve it. The Department of Veterans Affairs spent the weekend before this one explaining, in a hearing room and in a string of inspector general reports, why it cannot pay roughly 75,000 surviving spouses, children, and post-9/11 student veterans the education benefits it already promised them. The vehicle for the failure is the Digital GI Bill, a software modernization project that was awarded to Accenture Federal Services in March 2021 at a contract value of $453 million. Five years later, the cost has more than doubled to roughly $932 million, the old benefits system it was supposed to replace is still running, and the dependents waiting on tuition payments are calling congressional offices.

This is what a Memorial Day argument should look like in 2026. Not abstract gratitude. A concrete program, a concrete contract, a concrete number of families left holding the bag. The country can either build the systems that make its promises real, or it can keep funding ceremonies and call that enough. Right now it is doing the second one.

A contract that doubled while veterans waited

The numbers are not contested. In August 2024 the VA Office of Inspector General released an audit titled “VBA Needs to Improve Oversight of the Digital GI Bill Platform.” It found that the Veterans Benefits Administration’s “insufficient planning” had added about $479 million in cost overruns to a contract originally pitched at $453 million. The platform was supposed to replace the Benefits Delivery Network, an aging system the VA has been trying to retire for years. Instead, the decommissioning of that older system has slipped from September 2023 to as late as spring 2025, and the new platform’s required test environments were short by two as of January 2024.

The OIG report is not subtle. It says VBA “failed to include staff who had the required technical expertise” when writing the work statements that drive what the contractor builds. Translation: the people in charge of telling Accenture what to build did not know enough about the system to define what they were ordering. The result is the federal contracting equivalent of the cab meter running while everyone argues about the address.

The point Congress is supposed to enforce here is the same constitutional one this site has argued about in a different context: the legislature is supposed to set the terms on which executive-branch money gets spent. When the VA renegotiates a contract upward by half a billion dollars without the kind of public oversight that would normally accompany that scale of cost change, Congress’s role shrinks from setting policy to receiving updates.

Representative Tom Barrett, who chairs the House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity, framed the cost picture more starkly in a recent oversight hearing: the Digital GI Bill contract was awarded five years ago for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the full life-cycle price is now “into the billions.” That is a fair characterization of a fixed-price modernization contract that has already doubled, with the older system it was meant to replace still operating in parallel.

It also fits an unhappy pattern in federal program management this year. The same Congress that cannot resolve the DHS shutdown that has put TSA and Secret Service paychecks at risk is also presiding over a benefits modernization that quietly doubled its budget while underdelivering. The detail that makes the Digital GI Bill case worse is that the program was supposed to insulate its end users from exactly that kind of broader political dysfunction. Modernization was the promise that surviving spouses would not depend on a fragile chain of legacy systems run by people who were not there when the code was written.

The 75,000 families are the point

Cost overruns are familiar enough in federal IT that they can numb a reader. The harder number is the human one. Barrett’s hearing examined how the Digital GI Bill payment failures delayed benefits for “over 75,000” participants in the Survivors’ and Dependents’ Educational Assistance program and the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The first group is, by name, the people the country pays because the service member is dead, permanently disabled, missing in action, or held as a prisoner of war. It is the most morally direct constituency the VA serves.

The Digital GI Bill is the system that processes those payments. When it does not work, the consequence is not abstract. A surviving spouse cannot register for next semester’s classes. A child of a fallen soldier cannot pay a housing deposit. A post-9/11 veteran loses the predictable monthly stipend that lets them stay enrolled. None of those families chose Accenture’s bid. None of them sit on the contracting committees that wrote unclear requirements. They are downstream of a procurement failure they had no role in causing, and they are being told to wait.

That is the part of this story Memorial Day should not be allowed to paper over. The country can stand at attention all morning at Arlington and still be running an education benefits system that defaults its surviving dependents into hardship. Both things are true at once. One of them is harder to fix than the other, and the country has been choosing the easier one for five years.

The honest counterargument

The honest version of the other side runs like this. Federal IT modernization is genuinely hard. Decommissioning a 1960s-era benefits system that decades of policy patches have grown into is harder than decommissioning a clean commercial codebase. Accenture is not a fly-by-night contractor; it leads federal IT work because most of the alternatives have worse track records. And the VA, after years of criticism over claims backlogs, has in fact made measurable progress on the broader benefits backlog, which has fallen below 100,000 claims for the first time since 2020 according to the agency’s own data.

Each of those points is fair. None of them excuses the Digital GI Bill failure. A backlog in disability claims is a different system from an education benefits platform. Accenture’s federal track record does not relieve the contracting officer’s duty to write a clear performance work statement. And the difficulty of modernization is precisely the argument for assigning trained staff to write the requirements, not the argument against asking why no one did.

If the defense of the program is going to be “it is hard,” the public response has to be “then staff it like it is hard.” The OIG report’s recommendation is essentially that. It calls for a “consistent and updated master schedule,” “strategies to address critical path failures,” and “stronger communication with the platform contractor.” Those are not radical reforms. They are the table stakes of running a $900 million IT project.

What Memorial Day actually demands

The way this story usually gets covered, the political fight is between the party in power and the party out of it. That framing misses the structural point. The Digital GI Bill contract has now spanned three presidential administrations. The original $453 million award and the unclear requirements happened under Biden’s VA. The cost ballooned through the second half of his term. The platform’s continued slippage and the recent congressional hearings are happening under Trump’s. Both parties have owned this failure for some portion of its life, and neither has fixed it.

That is the worst kind of bipartisanship: shared neglect. It is the same dynamic visible elsewhere in the broader Politics coverage on this site — programs that move slowly enough that no single administration owns the failure, while the people downstream of the program take all the consequence. The fix is also bipartisan, and it is the kind of unglamorous oversight work that does not generate good clips. Congress should require quarterly milestone reporting from the VA on Digital GI Bill delivery, with cost variance broken out by phase. It should require that the next phase of work be awarded only after independent verification of the requirements. It should pay the 75,000 affected dependents what they are owed, on schedule, out of the older system in parallel until the new one actually works. And it should treat the next OIG follow-up as a real deadline, not background noise.

None of that is incompatible with laying wreaths and reading the names. It is what the wreaths are supposed to be in aid of. The promise behind the GI Bill is older than most living Americans. It was made to the generation that fought the Second World War, on the assumption that a country wealthy enough to win the war would be capable enough to write the checks afterward. The country is still wealthy. The capability is what is missing, and it is what the next Congress and the current VA leadership owe the families on the wait list.

Memorial Day will keep coming around every year. The question is whether next year’s version finds those 75,000 dependents paid on time, the Benefits Delivery Network finally retired, and the Digital GI Bill running the workload it was contracted to run. If not, the country should stop treating the holiday as a self-congratulation and start treating it as an audit.