Veterans Affairs contracting officers were given less than 11 hours in a single day to review hundreds of contracts marked for elimination under a DOGE-driven purge, according to a VA Office of Inspector General report released this month. The compressed timeline ultimately touched 2,210 contract actions VA considered canceling between February and July 2025, and forced acquisition staff at the department with the federal government's second-largest procurement budget to sign off on terminations before they could finish reading the files in front of them.

The review found that on Feb. 21, 2025, the principal executive director of VA's Office of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction and a senior adviser to the secretary ordered heads of contracting activity across the department to evaluate 1,049 contract actions, obtain approval from deputy under secretaries or deputy assistant secretaries, and report back to OALC — all in under 11 hours. Four days later, on Feb. 25, 2025, VA senior advisers and DOGE representatives directed staff to terminate the contracts regardless of incomplete reviews, a VA Category Management Support Office director told OIG.

How VA Compressed Months of Review Into Hours

By the time the effort wound down in July 2025, VA had terminated 435 contracts for convenience, worth roughly $1.1 billion combined. About 86% of those were consulting-services contracts, according to the OIG report and reporting by Government Executive. The 2,210 actions OIG examined were drawn from four lists VA used in public statements and congressional submissions between February and July 2025; OIG noted VA may have evaluated or terminated other contracts not on those lists, and only 435 of the 2,210 were actually terminated.

Investigators zeroed in on the Feb. 21 directive because it illustrates how little time career contracting staff had to weigh legal and financial consequences before signing off on cancellations that senior advisers and DOGE representatives had already decided on. Terminating a federal contract for convenience is not a simple cancel button — it triggers stop-work orders, settlement negotiations with contractors over incurred costs, and potential termination-for-convenience claims that can take months or years to resolve.

OIG Finds FAR Rules Were Followed Despite the Rush

Despite that compressed timeline, the inspector general did not find that VA broke procurement law. "Although the speed and volume of requests created challenges for VA acquisition staff, the OIG found that VA contracting officials generally complied with FAR requirements for terminating contracts," the report states. Contracting officers issued stop-work orders and termination notices consistent with FAR 49.102 and negotiated settlement costs under FAR 49.101 and 49.206-1, according to OIG's findings.

That conclusion matters because it separates two distinct questions the review set out to answer: whether the terminations themselves were legally sound, and whether VA's internal accounting of what it had terminated was accurate. OIG answered the first question largely in VA's favor. It answered the second very differently.

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Two Termination Lists, $120 Billion Apart

VA sent Congress two lists of terminated contracts during 2025 — one on May 16 and a second on July 3 — in response to oversight requests. OIG found both were wrong, and not by a small margin. The May list put the total value of terminated contracts at roughly $120.9 billion, more than 100 times OIG's confirmed figure of about $1.1 billion. One line item alone was listed at more than $21 billion when its actual value was approximately $74 million. "Both lists of terminated contracts were incomplete and inaccurate," the OIG report states flatly.

Investigators traced the errors to a flawed internal tracking dashboard and to VA staff who were unfamiliar with contracting terminology and mismarked figures as they compiled the reports for Congress — not, notably, to any AI tool associated with DOGE. OALC created a database in April 2025 to track the lists and correspondence, and VA sent Congress an updated list in April 2026, nearly a year after the first inaccurate submission went out.

The review was requested by Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee Ranking Member Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who had pressed VA for accountability over the cancellations. Blumenthal did not soften his response to the findings. "Secretary Collins owes us answers on how VA will replace lost services and how much this fiasco has cost taxpayers in arbitration, settlements, and reinstatements," Blumenthal said, according to Government Executive. "Veterans and taxpayers deserve transparency and a full public accounting."

OIG's report makes no recommendations, noting that OALC updated its list to Congress after OIG's January 2026 briefing and that VA continued reviewing and terminating contracts beyond the review's scope. VA obligated more than $78 billion in contracts in fiscal 2025, a scale that makes even a seemingly narrow tracking error, like the one that inflated the May list nearly 110-fold, difficult to catch without dedicated data controls.

What It Means for Contractors

For the consulting firms and other vendors caught in the 435 terminations, the OIG findings offer a mixed signal. The good news is that VA's terminations followed FAR procedures — stop-work orders, proper notices, and a settlement process under FAR Part 49 — which gives affected contractors a clear legal framework for pursuing termination settlement costs rather than facing an ad hoc process that could be challenged on procedural grounds.

The harder news is what the inaccurate congressional reporting reveals about VA's internal visibility into its own contract actions. A department that could not correctly total the value of contracts it had just terminated — off by a factor of more than 100 on paper, even as the underlying legal process held up — is a department whose contract files, obligations data, and closeout paperwork may take longer than usual to reconcile. Contractors awaiting final settlement payments or reinstatement decisions on VA consulting work should expect that the same tracking gaps OIG identified could slow resolution of their individual claims, even though the terminations that created those claims were, procedurally, done by the book.

Sources

Correction, Oct. 22, 2026: An earlier version of this article said a VA official told OIG about the termination direction four days after Feb. 21; the report says the direction was given Feb. 25, 2025, and the official later told OIG. It also said the 2,210 actions covered every contract VA flagged for cancellation; they came from four VA lists, and VA may have evaluated or terminated others. It also said OIG made no recommendations because OALC had begun corrective action including a new tracking database; the report says OALC updated its congressional list after OIG's January 2026 briefing and VA kept reviewing and terminating contracts beyond the review's scope, and the database was created in April 2025 to track the lists and correspondence.