Veterans Affairs contracting staff who canceled hundreds of contracts under pressure from the Department of Government Efficiency largely followed federal procurement law, but the tallies VA sent Congress to account for the purge were wrong, according to a VA Office of Inspector General report released Sept. 22. The review was requested by Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee ranking member Richard Blumenthal and Sen. Angus King, who wanted to know how VA decided which contracts to cancel "for convenience" once DOGE and the General Services Administration began pushing agencies to slash consulting and services spending after Jan. 20, 2025. Auditors examined 2,210 contract actions and found VA terminated 435 of them, worth roughly $1.1 billion, with about 86% tied to consulting-services work. Roughly 100 additional contract actions were terminated and then reinstated, meaning VA's own contracting staff walked back roughly a quarter as many cancellations as they ultimately let stand (100 of the 435 that held, about 23%) — a detail OIG cites as further evidence of how compressed and error-prone the process was, even where the final terminations held up.
The inspector general's central conclusion was largely favorable to VA's contracting workforce. "Although the speed and volume of the requests created challenges for VA staff, VA contracting officials generally complied with Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) requirements for terminating contracts," the report states. That finding matters because a termination that skips required FAR steps can expose an agency to legal challenges from displaced contractors and reversed cancellations, and OIG found the underlying terminations themselves were procedurally sound even as the process around them was chaotic. It is a distinction that separates two questions Congress had asked in different registers: whether VA broke procurement law when it moved to cancel hundreds of contracts at once, and whether VA could accurately account for what it had done afterward. OIG answered the first question with qualified reassurance and the second with a documented failure.
11 Hours to Review, Approve and Report Back
The chaos shows up in the timeline OIG reconstructed. On Feb. 21, 2025, VA's acquisition leadership directed contracting offices to review a batch of 1,049 contract actions, secure leadership approval and report results back up the chain — with less than 11 hours to do it, OIG found, a compressed window auditors said created real risk of error even where the paperwork ultimately checked out. The report does not treat that speed as neutral; it frames the 11-hour turnarounds as the operational reality DOGE's requests imposed on a workforce that normally builds termination decisions around multi-step legal and business reviews. Those reversed terminations — roughly 100 contract actions VA canceled and then reinstated — line up with the kind of mistake a same-day, 11-hour deadline would predictably produce: a contracting officer approves a cancellation under time pressure, then someone with more time to look reverses course.
A Director Says DOGE Ordered Terminations Regardless of 'Incomplete Reviews'
OIG's account goes beyond describing tight deadlines. A VA Category Management Support Office director told auditors that DOGE representatives and senior VA advisers directed staff to terminate contracts on Feb. 25, 2025, regardless of whether reviews were finished — instructing cancellations to proceed even with "incomplete reviews." That statement, attributed to a VA official inside the review's chain of command, is the clearest evidence in the report that the terminations were driven by an external deadline rather than by contracting officers working through their normal case-by-case analysis. It also helps explain why OIG's overall verdict — general FAR compliance — coexists with a process auditors otherwise describe as rushed and under outside direction.
Two Lists to Congress, Two Sets of Wrong Numbers
Where OIG was far less forgiving was VA's own accounting of what it had done. The department sent Congress two lists of terminated contracts, in May 2025 and July 2025, and OIG determined both were "incomplete and inaccurate." Investigators traced the errors partly to the fact that officials who compiled the information for Congress "were unfamiliar with contracting and acquisition terminology," producing lists that mixed up contract actions, dollar values and termination categories. The May 2025 list overstated the scope of the purge dramatically, reporting that VA had terminated 446 contract actions worth about $120 billion — a figure far removed from the $1.1 billion in actual terminated-for-convenience value OIG later calculated from the underlying data. VA has since given Congress an updated, clearer accounting, delivered in April 2026, roughly a year after the original DOGE-driven cancellations began.
The report makes no formal recommendations, and VA's Office of Procurement concurred with the draft findings without additional comment — a sign the department is not contesting OIG's account of either the termination process or the bad numbers that followed it. VA's public defense of the underlying decisions came through a spokesperson rather than the procurement office. "Thanks to the methodical and careful review process VA put in place, these contract cancellations had no negative impact whatsoever on VA care and benefits," VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven told Government Executive.
What It Means for Contractors
For the consulting and professional-services firms that made up 86% of the 435 terminated-for-convenience contracts, OIG's report offers little basis for reopening those specific cancellations: auditors found the terminations themselves generally complied with the FAR, and the report carries no recommendation to revisit them. Firms whose contracts were terminated and then reinstated — roughly 100 contract actions — are the clearest evidence that VA's own compressed review process produced mistakes in both directions, not just omissions in the DOGE-era purge but reversals once officials had time to look again. Contractors watching for a repeat of early-2025 conditions should note that OIG's report documents a specific external-pressure mechanism — a same-day directive from DOGE and senior VA advisers to terminate regardless of review status — as the proximate cause of the compressed timelines, rather than any change to VA's ordinary termination procedures. The bigger practical lesson is about VA's own reporting: the department twice sent Congress numbers about its own contracting actions that were wrong by orders of magnitude, a gap that took roughly a year to correct and that lawmakers relying on VA's public accounting will need to weigh against the more accurate figures now on record.
