There’s such a sea of chaotic information we’re all drifting through in these days that it is terribly difficult to find out precisely what is going on, to find the patterns that can bring the larger story into focus. I want to point to one of those patterns I noticed or which was brought to my attention last night. I think I’m the first to highlight this, though I may be wrong about that. Not trying to claim an exclusive; I want to point to the significance of the detail.
Let’s start with my story from last night about the abrupt and reckless cancelation of upwards of a thousand VA contracts totaling roughly $2 billion and covering a huge variety of work VA does, everything from funeral care to doctor recruitment. As I reported last night, VA contract officers were sent an Excel spreadsheet of almost a thousand contracts in the early morning of February 21st, told that all of these contracts should be canceled and that if anyone wanted to make a case to spare individual contracts they had until the end of business that day (February 21st) to make their case. My sources noted that the contract code on all of these contracts was NAICS – 541611, which is “Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services.” It’s very clear the DOGE people pulled up everything under that label and slated it to be cut. My sources’ impressions are that the DOGErs making these decisions read that label as basically, McKinsey/MBA consulting type bullshit, easy stuff to cut. At VA, most of it wasn’t that at all. But they didn’t seem to make any attempt to look under the hood at what those contracts were.
It turns out that the folks at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had a similar contracts fire drill about 10 days earlier. That’s the agency within HHS that literally runs both of those programs. Critically, all their kill list contracts had the identical NAICS code, 541611. It’s pretty clear DOGE was going in and trying to cancel anything under that heading. They got their email on the 10th and had to get the answers back by the afternoon of the 12th — so significantly longer, but still a crazy short amount of time. The difference is that CMS was able to save all or most of their contracts.
So why did it turn out differently at the VA?
With the VA debacle, the impression my sources had was that everyone’s afraid of DOGE and no one wanted to stick their head up and risk firing or whatever other punishment to try to save those contracts. But they and we don’t know that. That part is in the “think,” “supposition” bucket for the people who know the players involved. We only know that they only had a day to try to save those contracts and at least most of them, and it seems all of them, were canceled.
But there are some key differences that may explain the different outcome. At VA, there were upwards of a thousand contracts in a spreadsheet dumped on contract officers with only a day to make any arguments. So in addition to possibly no one wanting to get DOGEd, there may have just been too little time to dig in to that many contracts. At CMS there were many fewer contracts, each with larger price tags. And they had substantially more time. It’s possible they had time to mobilize, fewer moving parts to deal with. At CMS, critically, the people who had to defend these contracts could literally say, if this one gets turned off, this part of Medicare will disappear. Even to Diet Sprite-swilling DOGE micro-bros, that’s got to be a fairly convincing argument. Whatever the differences, as it was explained to me, the people at CMS were able to save all or almost all their contacts. They brought receipts for each one; they directed people to precisely which top CMS person could say, yep, all hell breaks lose if that gets turned off.
I want to make clear here: I’m not saying VA people dropped the ball. Maybe they did. But we don’t know the details of what happened. We can’t rule out the possibility that people at VA went to bat for these contracts and DOGE just said no. What’s notable to me is that it seems fairly programmatic. They show up at each agency and flag this bucket to be cut, usually and likely always without having any idea what’s in that bucket. Very specific, very cookie cutter. I’m still waiting for details from other agencies. I’ve gotten indications that it’s been very similar. But I don’t yet have the granular detail. I’d be very eager to hear from others who have some visibility into these conversations over the last month.