Lawmakers demand review of VA’s AI-driven contract cuts

Two senators on the panel overseeing the Department of Veterans Affairs are pressing the agency’s inspector general to probe VA’s mass contract cancellations and the role that artificial intelligence played in determining the agreements that would be terminated. 

In a June 13-dated letter to VA Inspector General David Case that was publicly released on Monday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Angus King, I-Maine, called for the agency watchdog to review the hundreds of VA contracts cancelled by the Department of Government Efficiency since the start of the Trump administration. 

Blumenthal is the ranking member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and King is also a member of the committee.

In line with DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts, VA Secretary Doug Collins has announced that the agency is looking at letting go of as many as 83,000 employees across its operations this year to return to its 2019 staffing levels. Collins similarly announced in March that VA was cancelling “585 non-mission-critical or duplicative contracts,” with plans to cancel additional agreements as the agency continued its review. 

In both instances, Collins stressed that the efforts are designed to streamline VA’s operations and to limit unnecessary spending, and that they would not affect mission-critical programs.

The lawmakers — who wrote that VA has cancelled over 650 contracts through the end of May — said, however, that a preliminary review of the terminated agreements found that “a majority appear to be for services directly for veterans or critical VA operations to include for safe health care delivery,” and that it also seemed as though the agency did not perform the necessary planning needed before undertaking the mass cancellations. 

They also cited a June 6 ProPublica investigation “that found evidence that DOGE and VA officials used ill-conceived Artificial Intelligence (AI) formulas and algorithms to make or inform contract cancellation decisions — cutting out meaningful input from VA career experts to assess the impact of ending these services.”

Blumenthal similarly pointed to the news report about the use of AI during a Democrat-only June 10 spotlight forum, saying at the time that he supported cutting waste at VA but that “the way to focus on it is thoughtfully and factually, not to use AI and identify keywords in the contract that then result in wholesale slashing.” 

The two lawmakers said the use of AI to identify contracts for termination “adds an entire new level of unease connected to the decision-making, security, governance, and quality control of the entire process.”

In an interview with ProPublica, the DOGE employee who created the AI tool that was used to identify contracts for “munching” — or cancellation — at VA told the outlet that “mistakes were made” by his program. He also said that analyzing VA’s nearly 90,000 contracts within the 30-day period outlined by President Donald Trump’s February executive order mandating such a review of agencies’ “spending on contracts, grants and loans” would have been impossible without developing the AI tool.

In addition to pressing the IG to investigate the impact of the cancelled contracts on veterans and VA as a whole, Blumenthal and King also requested that the watchdog look into “the use of AI and/or algorithms to guide decision-making to include the recipient and purpose” of each VA contract identified for termination.

The lawmakers also asked that the IG review “the formal assignment and instructions given” to the DOGE employee to determine if they included the use of AI, as well as look into whether there were data privacy safeguards in place for the contract information run through the AI tool and “the extent to which this and any other related use of AI by DOGE or the VA violated any policy, procedure, regulation, or statute.”