VA IT contract cancellation DOGE boasted about … was due to end in 10 days anyway

Elon Musk’s DOGE promoted the decision to terminate a deal with service-disabled veterans supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs 10 days before the contract was set to expire anyway.

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A DOGE post on X earlier this month said the VA had ended a $3.5 million contract for “enterprise mail management program support services.” As The Register reported at the time, the post said the VA is now set to do the work in-house.

The DOGE staffers said via the post that the cancellation of that IT contract, which was being run by veterans who sustained disabilities connected to their military service, was among the 247 federal government contract cancellations that would save “around $390 million.”

The VA “enterprise mail management” contract was with Duty First Consulting, a company founded by service-disabled entrepreneurs that provides IT and business process consulting services to the federal government. It falls under the category of organizations known as Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Businesses (SDVOSBs) in US government procurement parlance.

DOGE shared a screenshot of the purchase order, which said the contract was modified to “terminate for convenience” and would end on March 4, 2025, the same date the notice was signed.

However, The Register can reveal that the Federal Procurement Data System shows another purchase order from February 21, 2025, which indicates the Duty First Consulting contract was due to be completed on March 14, 2025 – only 10 days after DOGE and/or the VA signed the termination notice.

The Register has asked the VA why it was necessary to terminate a contract so close to its planned completion date and how much money was actually saved by doing so. The org had not yet responded at the time of publication.

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The published details of the contract on USAspending.gov show a total potential award amount of $3,549,981.52, including a current outlay of $1,403,053.52. However, notes on the page provide a caveat saying, “award-level outlay data are incomplete prior to FY 2022, and almost entirely absent prior to FY 2020.”

The first purchase order on the contract was approved in November 20, 2020, at which point, the estimated completion date of the contract was given as November 22, 2024.

Four subsequent purchase orders indicate the same end date, until a fifth purchase order from 14 November last year says the contract would end on February 22, 2025.

All of this appears to indicate that the contract ran its course and then was extended a couple of times.

In an earlier statement, the VA said the Duty First Consulting contract was “one of 585 duplicative or non-mission-critical contracts VA canceled,” adding, “The reductions will not negatively affect Veteran care, benefits or services and will enable VA to redirect more than $900 million to health care, benefits and services for VA beneficiaries.

“To date, VA has reviewed just 2 percent of the department’s 90,000 contracts, which total more than $67 billion. The department anticipates significant additional savings once its review of the remaining 88,000 VA contracts is complete.”

The VA said it was focused on serving Veterans better than ever before. “Doing so requires finding efficiencies, changing and improving the organization,” it said. ®