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.
