Oracle made a KC success story a cautionary tale. Veterans pay the price | Opinion
Serving Kansans in the state Senate was one of the true privileges of my life. I worked for tax relief, economic growth and conservative values. During my time in that body, I was proud to be a part of developing several successful economic growth policies and programs. In developing these policies we supported accountability, analysis of the return on investment and benchmarks regarding progress.
As a result of economic growth policies, Kansas was able to attract a leading innovative medical technology company, Cerner, to locate a new campus in Village West, near the Kansas Speedway. It was a big, bold swing. The location in Wyandotte County was a part of a transformational economic shift for the county. Cerner committed to creating 4,500 jobs at an average salary of $65,000.
At the time, Cerner was the real deal: a genuinely great American company, homegrown right here in Kansas City, that had built itself into one of the dominant players in health information technology. Betting on Cerner felt like betting on a sure thing.
And for a while, it was. Then Oracle showed up and began making changes.
Oracle acquired Cerner in June 2022 for $28.4 billion. On paper, it looked like a triumph — a validation of everything that Kansas City’s tech sector had built over decades.
It appears Oracle wasn’t buying Cerner because it believed in Cerner’s mission, its workforce or its culture. Oracle was buying Cerner primarily to get its hands on one thing: Cerner’s $10 billion contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs to modernize the VA’s electronic health record system. That contract was the crown jewel — and once Oracle had it, the rest of Cerner became, in many ways, less significant.
The layoffs started almost immediately. Thousands of Oracle employees — many of them right here in the Kansas City area — found themselves out of work as Oracle slashed its way through the workforce it had just acquired. The campus Kansans had supported went from a symbol of regional economic pride to a cautionary tale about what can happen when a company is acquired and then realigns its priorities without regard to past commitments and employees.
As sad as the story is for Kansans, it pales in comparison to what has happened at the VA.
The VA’s Electronic Health Record Modernization program — built on the Cerner platform, now managed by Oracle — has been, by any honest measure, a disaster. Cost overruns have ballooned to staggering levels, with the program’s price tag now estimated to far exceed its original projections, potentially reaching $33 billion or more over its lifetime. Deployments have been plagued by outages, medication errors and failures that directly increase risk to patient safety. Congressional oversight committees — on a bipartisan basis — have issued scathing reports, even with reports of deaths. The VA’s own inspector general has documented case after case of system failures putting veterans at risk.
Let me be direct: Veterans who served this country are receiving substandard medical care today, in part, because it appears Oracle prioritized its own acquisition strategy over the mission it was contracted to fulfill. Oracle has now laid off more than 500 employees in Kansas City “for AI investment shift,” as a local TV station reported.
Promises to workers broken
This is not what any of us signed up for. When Kansas structured those incentives for Cerner, we were betting on a company that genuinely believed its work could transform healthcare. That company doesn’t really exist anymore — not in the way it did. What replaced it is a software giant that saw a government contract as a revenue stream, stripped the acquired company talent and institutional knowledge that made it work, and left a trail of broken promises — to Kansans, to Kansas City workers and — most important — to American veterans.
I’m not writing this to relitigate the past. I’m writing this because accountability matters. Oracle made commitments when it acquired Cerner. The federal government made commitments to veterans when it signed the VA contract. Neither set of commitments has been kept.
Kansas got a fractional return on its investment and a loss of significant jobs. Veterans got system outages and medication errors. Thousands of Kansas City-area workers got pink slips.
This month, the VA began rolling out implementation of the long-paused electronic health record program in several states around the country. This is not simply a financial reality for our veterans. This directly impacts their health care and quality of life. They deserve better. So do the Kansas City workers who built Cerner into the industry leader it once was.
Kansas made a bet on Cerner — and Oracle cashed the check and walked away from the table.
It’s time someone provides accountability.
Nick Jordan served as Kansas secretary of revenue and interim secretary of commerce from 2011 to 2019. He represented the 10th District in the Kansas Senate from 1995 to 2008.