There won’t be any answers later this month on the controversial bid process surrounding the new Butler VA Healthcare Center project in Center Township.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the matter: VA officials should be compelled to tell the public how the re-bidding process was conducted.

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, who announced the meetings’ cancellation on Tuesday, said he wants to see Congress extract answers from the VA via congressional hearing.

That seems the next logical course of action to us as well. Senators Pat Toomey and Bob Casey should join with Kelly and demand an explanation.

The Center Township project is moving forward, but still mired in a legal kerfuffle between developers Oxford and Cambridge. That’s the reason VA and Cambridge officials cited in turning down invitations to a town hall meeting organized by Kelly and scheduled for later this month.

Normally that might be enough to get everyone off the hook. But in case officials at the VA missed it, these are not normal circumstances. Their organization, faced with a massive loss of public confidence, needs to open up, not clam up.

The cost-benefit analysis for VA officials here should have been simple: The longer an already skeptical public is deprived of an explanation on how the project’s second round of bidding was conducted at the federal level, the worse the VA looks.

These aren’t idle concerns or questions. There are serious reasons to believe the VA can’t be relied upon to run its own construction projects.

The Butler VA Healthcare Center has been a “work in progress” since 2007, said acting director Timothy Burke. Burke and health systems specialist Ken Kalberer called the process a roller coaster ride that, at this point, has local veterans and VA administrators “numb.”

“It’s almost become a ‘we’ll believe it when we see it,’ for us,” Burke said.

That’s nothing compared to a VA project in Aurora, Colo., which has dragged on since the 1990s. That project’s price tag now sits at $1.7 billion: $1 billion over budget and counting.

The budget overruns could nearly build a second stadium for the Dallas Cowboys, who play football in Jerry Jones’ $1.2 billion palace.

VA officials in Washington apparently fail to realize that, in the wake of these kinds of public relations nightmares, it’s at least worth showing up to explain why things have gone so badly here.

If VA officials won’t offer any information on their own — or even bother taking the time to listen to citizens’ questions and concerns — they should be compelled to answer by lawmakers in formal proceedings.