Somewhere in the Department of Veterans Affairs, a dashboard once displayed a number so large it should have triggered an alarm rather than a press release. A single contract action, the VA told Congress in May 2025, had a value north of $21 billion.
The actual figure, according to the VA Office of Inspector General, was just over $74 million. That is not a rounding error. That is a factor of roughly 284, the kind of gap you get when nobody checks the math before it goes to the Hill.
The OIG’s new review of “contracts terminated for convenience” was requested by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Angus King, who wanted to know what happened when the Department of Government Efficiency, VA senior advisers, and the General Services Administration went hunting through VA’s contract portfolio in early 2025.
The answer, once you strip away the chest-thumping, is that VA terminated 435 contracts worth about $1.1 billion, out of 2,210 contract actions the OIG reviewed. Everything else on the lists VA sent to Congress was either reinstated, never terminated at all, or simply wrong.
Efficiency, Measured in Wheelchair Ramps
The most instructive failure here is not the math. It is what got swept into the “terminated” pile in the first place. VA’s July 2025 submission to Congress claimed 1,667 contracts had been terminated or were being terminated. The OIG found the real number was 366, and 17 of those were later reinstated.
The other roughly 1,300 actions on that list had nothing to do with termination; they were supply contracts that had simply run their course, including orders for prosthetics, surgical implants, and wheelchair ramps, plus more than 150 healthcare contract actions such as nursing home service orders.
A Category Management Support Office official told the OIG that DOGE representatives “wanted to claim credit for any contracts that ended,” whether or not the government actually ended them. That is a remarkable sentence to find in a federal audit. It means the savings narrative being fed to Congress was padded with equipment orders for amputee veterans that had simply finished delivering, filed under the same banner as genuine cost-cutting.
The distinction between “we canceled this” and “this was already over” apparently did not matter much to whoever was compiling the list.
The Eleven-Hour Review
To be fair to VA’s rank-and-file contracting staff, the OIG’s account of how this played out reads less like malice and more like triage under fire.
From February through June 2025, OALC and VA senior advisers issued at least 47 orders demanding that contracting officials justify, terminate, pause, or reinstate contracts, on top of a running stream of follow-up emails from GSA and DOGE representatives. On February 21, 2025, officials were handed 1,049 contract actions to review, get approved by deputy under secretaries, and report back on, all within less than 11 hours.
Some offices did not finish in time. The CMSO director told the OIG that VA senior advisers and DOGE representatives ordered the terminations to proceed regardless. VA had built a questionnaire asking whether each contract provided direct veteran care, required specialized skills VA could not hire for, or was merely administrative support like scheduling; the tool existed, the deadlines simply did not leave room to use it properly.
Officials, VHA staff among them, told the OIG that instructions arrived from OALC, VA senior advisers, and DOGE representatives simultaneously, on inconsistently formatted lists that sometimes duplicated the same contract action twice. VA did not build a database to track the churn until April 2025, months after the worst of the chaos had already passed.
Nobody Spoke Federal Acquisition
The OIG’s explanation for the inflated dollar figures is almost charming in its bluntness. The officials assembling the lists sent to Congress “were unfamiliar with contracting and acquisition terminology.” VA had built a tracking dashboard to monitor the terminations, and that dashboard miscalculated contract values, apparently without anyone downstream noticing that a single contract does not typically run twenty times the annual budget of a mid-sized federal agency.
This is the recurring shape of the DOGE-era efficiency push across the government; fast, politically driven demands for numbers, staffed by people with strong opinions about waste and thin knowledge of how contracts actually work, producing figures that collapse the moment an inspector general opens the file.
VA’s own contracting officers, notably, come out of this review relatively well; the OIG found they generally complied with Federal Acquisition Regulation requirements even while being ordered around by people who did not know what a settlement cost was.
Of the 267 terminated contracts that reached a settlement agreement, 150 cost the government nothing at all, and the remaining 117 cost about $10.6 million combined, a figure that would have looked almost quaint next to the phantom $21 billion the dashboard once reported.
The Cleanup, Eventually
VA has since sent Congress a corrected list, submitted April 13, 2026, after the OIG briefed OALC officials in January. The OIG did not audit that list’s accuracy. It also declined to make any recommendations, since VA’s own procurement leadership simply concurred with the draft report and offered no comment, the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug.
What remains is a case study in how “government efficiency” gets manufactured for public consumption. Real terminations, genuinely worth $1.1 billion, buried under a much larger pile of expired supply orders and inflated dashboards, sent to Congress by people who could not tell a completed prosthetics contract from a canceled one.
The veterans who needed those wheelchair ramps got them either way. The number on the press release did not.
