The system built to speed up GI Bill payments delayed 75,000 of them. It also cost twice what VA planned.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has spent five years and counting trying to retire a payment system built in the 1970s. That system, the Benefits Delivery Network, "uses outdated software languages and unsupported hardware" and has been marked for retirement since 2003, according to the VA Office of Inspector General.▸ It is also, still, the system that processes about $40 billion a year in veterans' education entitlements. Its replacement, the Digital GI Bill platform, has cost twice its planned budget and — when a piece of it went live in August 2025 — broke payments to tens of thousands of the people it was built to serve.

VA awarded the original 10-year, $453 million contract to Accenture Federal Services in March 2021 to build the Digital GI Bill platform.▸ By August 2024, the VA Inspector General found that VBA had renegotiated the contract, adding $479 million and pushing the total to $932 million — more than double the original price, before the platform was even finished. The OIG traced the overrun to VBA's own planning: the agency did not assign "personnel who were sufficiently trained and experienced" to define the platform's requirements, missed its original October 2022 testing deadline, and still lacked an integrated master schedule as of early 2023, nearly two years into the project.

Part of the reason the platform costs so much is what it has to replace.▸ The Benefits Delivery Network isn't a minor back-office tool — it is the "primary database and payment system for all Education Service benefit programs," and VA has had to pay extra just to keep it alive long enough for its replacement to catch up: a $24.6 million contract extension to maintain the legacy mainframe for two additional years after VA missed its 2023 decommissioning target, per the same OIG report.

Whatever system processes it, the money itself is not small.▸ In fiscal year 2024, VA's education benefit programs paid out just over $12 billion to 901,463 beneficiaries. The Post-9/11 GI Bill — the program most exposed to the Digital GI Bill platform's problems — accounted for $9.65 billion of that, reaching 573,732 veterans and family members.

Behind the Post-9/11 GI Bill sits the Survivors' and Dependents' Educational Assistance program, or Chapter 35 — a monthly stipend for the children and spouses of veterans who died in service or were rated 100% disabled.▸ It's a smaller program, $2.08 billion against the Post-9/11 GI Bill's $9.65 billion, but it was the one that broke first.

In August 2025, VA moved Chapter 35 disbursements onto the new claims system.▸ According to The American Legion, the transition triggered a software failure that halted automated payments to more than 75,000 students — survivors and dependents relying on that stipend for tuition and housing. The failure predated the federal government shutdown that began October 1, 2025, but the shutdown made it worse: the technicians who could fix it were furloughed, and manual processing of the backlog wasn't expected to finish until late November or early December. The House Committee on Veterans' Affairs held an oversight hearing in December 2025 specifically on the failure, with Technology Modernization Subcommittee Chairman Tom Barrett noting VA had communicated almost nothing to the affected students and schools while it was happening.

That failure sits awkwardly next to VA's own progress claims.▸ By April 2026, VA said the platform was processing more than 60% of education claims same-day, and VA officials told Congress in reporting from Stars and Stripes that 65% of claims were being automated without any staff review as of December 2025 — the same month Congress was holding a hearing on a payment failure the new system had just caused. Both things are true at once: the platform is faster for most claims that go through it cleanly, and it broke badly enough in its first real deployment to cut off benefits to 75,000 people who needed them for rent and tuition.

Figures are drawn from VA's FY2024 Annual Benefits Report and its Inspector General's August 2024 audit; more recent automation and enrollment figures cited from VA's April 2026 press release and February 2026 reporting are the latest publicly available as of this writing and were not independently re-verified against a primary VA dataset beyond what those sources report.