As I wrote below, yesterday VA Secretary Collins was out bragging that he and DOGE had found more than $2 billion of BS professional services contracts that they were cutting right away. Then today the whole thing blew up in their faces. The contracts weren’t at all what they they’d described and they either didn’t know or didn’t care that the great majority of those contracts were with what are called service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses – SDVOSBs. I’ve done so poking around and I can share a bit more about how this seems to have happened. It’s probably a microcosm of damage being wrought across the executive branch.
Here’s my understanding. DOGE is looking for contracts to cut at the VA, a repeat of what we’ve seen across numerous agencies. They come across a contract code (NAICs 541611) that lists as ‘Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services’. So they figure, okay, this is some McKinsey type BS. We can definitely cut that.
I’ve gotten slightly conflicting word on exactly how many contracts. Seems to be between 800 and 1000. On the morning of February 21st, a VA official sent out an excel spreadsheet listing all of those contracts to VA contract officers and said something to the effect of we want to cancel all of these. If any of them seem super important to you get back to us by the end of business today.
In today’s climate people probably think that if you look at DOGE the wrong way you get canned. And I take it there wasn’t a lot of pushback, though I don’t have detail on that front. In fact, the contracts, as I mentioned in the post below, covered everything from cancer prevention programs to burial services to doctor recruitment campaigns for the VA, to medical services of various sorts. In other words, about everything you can imagine that goes into VA efforts beyond the doctor who sees you when you visit a VA facility.
The great majority of these contracts are also to SDVOSB-owned small businesses. I wasn’t able to get an exact percentage. But my impression is that these contracts are overwhelmingly in that category. Those SDVOSB-businesses mostly themselves hire veterans. There’s a whole statutory framework about preferences for these SDVOSB companies.
The impression I get is that the people who made this decision didn’t really know what these contracts were for or the backgrounds of the small businesses they were about to drive out of business. Needless to say that’s quite an indictment in itself. Obviously they didn’t care enough to find out, which is fairly stunning when you’re canceling something approaching a thousand contracts worth roughly $2 billion. Remarkably, Secretary Collins doesn’t seem to have checked or asked about any of this before making the video I included in the previous post. (It’s worth taking a moment to watch the video.) My impression is that lots of people have been laid off even in the day or so since this happened, or if they haven’t formally gotten word they believe they’ve lost their jobs.
Late this afternoon, the VA switched gears and now they say they’re reviewing what happened. So it’s not clear whether a subset of contracts are going to be reprieved or whether they’re going to just undo the whole thing.
