Let’s be straight about what happened here — because veterans deserve the truth, not spin.
The Department of Government Efficiency moved into the Department of Veterans Affairs earlier this year with the stated goal of cutting waste and saving taxpayer money. The intentions may have been good. The execution was a disaster.
At the center of the problem is a software tool written by former DOGE staffer Sahil Lavingia. The program was designed to analyze VA contracts and flag them for cancellation — to “munch” through thousands of contracts and identify waste.
It didn’t work correctly.
Procurement experts and AI specialists who reviewed the tool described it as deeply flawed. The program used outdated AI models and was given conflicting instructions that produced errors at scale. Contracts that provided direct veteran care were flagged alongside administrative overhead. The tool didn’t know the difference — and apparently no one at DOGE was checking its work carefully enough.
The result: approximately 2,000 VA contracts were canceled. Another 14,000 were allowed to expire without renewal or replacement plans. Some of those contracts were, by any reasonable assessment, unnecessary spending. But many were not.
Here’s a detail that deserves more attention than it has gotten.
The VA claimed to have saved $120.8 billion through these contract cancellations. That number is not just wrong — it’s impossible. The entire VA contracting budget for fiscal year 2024 was less than that. As one example: a single program management contract worth $84.9 million was reported in DOGE’s savings figures as $44.8 billion.
Those are not rounding errors. Those are fabricated savings numbers used to justify cuts that harmed veterans.
The on-the-ground impact has been real and measurable.
Mental health appointment wait times for new patients now exceed 35 days at VA facilities nationwide. That matters because federal policy sets 20 days as the threshold at which veterans become eligible for community care — meaning outside providers. Wait times above 20 days are supposed to trigger alternative access. They’re now nearly double that threshold.
Suicide prevention services were also briefly affected by contract cancellations before the VA reversed course following public backlash. Direct disability payments have not been cut — veterans are still receiving their compensation checks. But access to providers, mental health care, and specialty services has deteriorated.
After significant pushback from veterans groups, members of Congress, and VA employees, the VA halted further DOGE-related cuts. Several senators — including members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee — have formally demanded a full accounting of which contracts were canceled and why.
The VA has not provided that accounting publicly.
Kash Patel’s FBI, Bondi’s DOJ, and the DOGE team have done real work exposing corruption and waste in the federal government. This column has covered much of it approvingly. But this veteran community does not give anyone a pass when it comes to the care our people were promised.
Veterans were promised a VA that works. A flawed AI that invents $44 billion in savings while cutting mental health services is not what they were promised. The administration that wants credit for fixing Washington should also own the places where it broke something.
The cuts need a full audit. The savings numbers need to be corrected. And the veterans who lost their providers deserve to get them back.
