During a “spotlight forum” led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. — the ranking member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee — lawmakers pressed their concerns that VA has arbitrarily cancelled hundreds of contracts in recent months without the necessary oversight needed to determine their importance to the agency. The forum did not include any Republican lawmakers.
The DOGE cost-cutting unit has been tasked by President Donald Trump with slashing spending across the federal government, which has included mass layoffs across some agencies and widespread contract cancellations. In line with these efforts, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced that the agency is considering laying off as many as 83,000 employees across its operations this year to return to its 2019 staffing levels. Collins has stressed that the efforts are designed to streamline VA’s operations and would not affect mission-critical programs.
As part of its cuts, VA also announced in March that it was terminating “585 non-mission-critical or duplicative contracts,” which it said were identified “through a deliberative, multi-level review that involved the career subject-matter expert employees responsible for the contracts as well as VA senior leaders and contracting officials.” The agency also said the news represented “the first step” in a review of VA’s roughly 90,000 contracts.
Democrat lawmakers have expressed alarm about the scale of terminated contracts, alleging that VA has intentionally slow-walked the full disclosure of the cancelled agreements in response to their requests for information. VA, for its part, said it w ..
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