The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts “MUNCHABLE.”

The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.

The DOGE AI tool flagged more than 2,000 contracts for “munching.” It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled — the Trump administration’s decisions on VA contracts have largely been a black box. The VA uses contractors for many reasons, including to support hospitals, research and other services aimed at caring for ailing veterans.

VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts overall. Congressional Democrats have been pressing VA leaders for specific details of what’s been canceled without success.

We identified at least two dozen on the DOGE list that have been canceled so far. Among the canceled contracts was one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. Another was to provide additional tools to measure and improve the care nurses provide.

ProPublica obtained the code and the contracts it flagged from a source and shared them with a half dozen AI and procurement experts. All said the script was flawed. Many criticized the concept of using AI to guide budgetary cuts at the VA, with one calling it “deeply problematic.”

Cary Coglianese, professor of law and of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the governmental use and regulation of artificial intelligence, said he was troubled by the use of these general-purpose large language models, or LLMs. “I don’t think off-the-shelf LLMs have a great deal of reliability for something as complex and involved as this,” he said.

Sahil Lavingia, the programmer enlisted by DOGE, which was then run by Elon Musk, acknowledged flaws in the code.

“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”

Though Lavingia has talked about his time at DOGE previously, this is the first time his work has been examined in detail and the first time he’s publicly explained his process, down to specific lines of code.

Lavingia has nearly 15 years of experience as a software engineer and entrepreneur but no formal training in AI. He briefly worked at Pinterest before starting Gumroad, a small e-commerce company that nearly collapsed in 2015. “I laid off 75% of my company — including many of my best friends. It really sucked,” he said. Lavingia kept the company afloat by “replacing every manual process with an automated one,” according to a post on his personal blog.

Lavingia did not have much time to immerse himself in how the VA handles veterans’ care between starting on March 17 and writing the tool on the following day. Yet his experience with his own company aligned with the direction of the Trump administration, which has embraced the use of AI across government to streamline operations and save money.

Lavingia said the quick timeline of Trump’s February executive order, which gave agencies 30 days to complete a review of contracts and grants, was too short to do the job manually. “That’s not possible — you have 90,000 contracts,” he said. “Unless you write some code. But even then it’s not really possible.”

Under a time crunch, Lavingia said he finished the first version of his contract-munching tool on his second day on the job — using AI to help write the code for him. He told ProPublica he then spent his first week downloading VA contracts to his laptop and analyzing them.

VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz lauded DOGE’s work on vetting contracts in a statement to ProPublica. “As far as we know, this sort of review has never been done before, but we are happy to set this commonsense precedent,” he said.

The VA is reviewing all of its 76,000 contracts to ensure each of them benefits veterans and is a good use of taxpayer money, he said. Decisions to cancel or reduce the size of contracts are made after multiple reviews by VA employees, including agency contracting experts and senior staff, he wrote.

Kasperowicz said that the VA will not cancel contracts for work that provides services to veterans or that the agency cannot do itself without a contingency plan in place. He added that contracts that are “wasteful, duplicative or involve services VA has the ability to perform itself” will typically be terminated.

Trump officials have said they are working toward a “goal” of cutting around 80,000 people from the VA’s workforce of nearly 500,000. Most employees work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics.

The VA has said it would avoid cutting contracts that directly impact care out of fear that it would cause harm to veterans. ProPublica recently reported that relatively small cuts at the agency have already been jeopardizing veterans’ care.

The VA has not explained how it plans to simultaneously move services in-house, as Lavingia’s code suggested was the plan, while also slashing staff.

Many inside the VA told ProPublica the process for reviewing contracts was so opaque they couldn’t even see who made the ultimate decisions to kill specific contracts. Once the “munching” script had selected a list of contracts, Lavingia said he would pass it off to others who would decide what to cancel and what to keep. No contracts, he said, were terminated “without human review.”

“I just delivered the [list of contracts] to the VA employees,” he said. “I basically put munchable at the top and then the others below.”

VA staffers told ProPublica that when DOGE identified contracts to be canceled early this year — before Lavingia was brought on — employees sometimes were given little time to justify retaining the service. One recalled being given just a few hours. The staffers asked not to be named because they feared losing their jobs for talking to reporters.

According to one internal email that predated Lavingia’s AI analysis, staff members had to respond in 255 characters or fewer — just shy of the 280 character limit on Musk’s X social media platform.

Once he started on DOGE’s contract analysis, Lavingia said he was confronted with technological limitations. At least some of the errors produced by his code can be traced to using older versions of OpenAI models available through the VA — models not capable of solving complex tasks, according to the experts consulted by ProPublica.

Moreover, the tool’s underlying instructions were deeply flawed. Records show Lavingia programmed the AI system to make intricate judgments based on the first few pages of each contract — about the first 2,500 words — which contain only sparse summary information.

“AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this,” said Waldo Jaquith, a former Obama appointee who oversaw IT contracting at the Treasury Department. “AI gives convincing looking answers that are frequently wrong. There needs to be humans whose job it is to do this work.”

Lavingia’s prompts did not include context about how the VA operates, what contracts are essential or which ones are required by federal law. This led AI to determine a core piece of the agency’s own contract procurement system was “munchable.”

At the core of Lavingia’s prompt is the direction to spare contracts involved in “direct patient care.”

Such an approach, experts said, doesn’t grapple with the reality that the work done by doctors and nurses to care for veterans in hospitals is only possible with significant support around them.

Lavingia’s system also used AI to extract details like the contract number and “total contract value.” This led to avoidable errors, where AI returned the wrong dollar value when multiple were found in a contract. Experts said the correct information was readily available from public databases.

Lavingia acknowledged that errors resulted from this approach but said those errors were later corrected by VA staff.

In late March, Lavingia published a version of the “munchable” script on his GitHub account to invite others to use and improve it, he told ProPublica. “It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script and anyone in the public could see that this is how the VA is thinking about cutting contracts.”

According to a post on his blog, this was done with the approval of Musk before he left DOGE. “When he asked the room about improving DOGE’s public perception, I asked if I could open-source the code I’d been writing,” Lavingia said. “He said yes — it aligned with DOGE’s goal of maximum transparency.”

That openness may have eventually led to Lavingia’s dismissal. Lavingia confirmed he was terminated from DOGE after giving an interview to Fast Company magazine about his work with the department. A VA spokesperson declined to comment on Lavingia’s dismissal.

VA officials have declined to say whether they will continue to use the “munchable” tool moving forward. But the administration may deploy AI to help the agency replace employees. Documents previously obtained by ProPublica show DOGE officials proposed in March consolidating the benefits claims department by relying more on AI.

And the government’s contractors are paying attention. After Lavingia posted his code, he said he heard from people trying to understand how to keep the money flowing.

“I got a couple DMs from VA contractors who had questions when they saw this code,” he said. “They were trying to make sure that their contracts don’t get cut. Or learn why they got cut.

“At the end of the day, humans are the ones terminating the contracts, but it is helpful for them to see how DOGE or Trump or the agency heads are thinking about what contracts they are going to munch. Transparency is a good thing.”

“There are real-life dangerous impacts for veterans,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, citing the news organization’s work.

This week, ProPublica reported on dozens of emails sent from staff at VA hospitals and clinics across the country to headquarters warning how cuts could, and in some cases are, degrading the agency’s ability to provide for the roughly 9 million veterans who rely on it.

Hiring freezes and other edicts from the White House have left medical providers scrambling and short-staffed amid an ever-shifting series of policy moves, including the cancellation of contracts with companies that maintain cancer registries, the emails said. Staffers at VA centers in Pennsylvania warned the cuts were causing “severe and immediate impacts,” including to “life-saving cancer trials.”

“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” one wrote, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.” Staffers at the hospital warned more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.

On Thursday, the House members, several of whom are veterans, demanded VA leadership provide more details on how cuts are affecting such work, in which service members often receive treatment they would not otherwise have access to.

“We all want to cut waste, fraud and abuse, but what we see today is when you cancel a contract, it means the end of a clinical trial that’s going to save someone’s life,” Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire said.

Notably, Deluzio, an Iraq War veteran whose Pittsburgh-area district includes a VA facility, and other lawmakers said they had learned about the impact for the first time from ProPublica’s reporting. On Thursday, they accused agency Secretary Doug Collins of stonewalling their efforts to find out what positions have been laid off, what contracts have been canceled and what future cuts will look like.

“We want the country to understand that this administration is hiding what they are doing, not just from us and the Congress, but from veterans and the American people,” Deluzio said.

“And the worst part is, we don’t know if anyone has died,” he added.

President Donald Trump has long said his administration will prioritize veterans and not compromise their care.

The disruptions at the VA have come even as the department has laid off just a few thousand staffers — a small fraction of the employees it said it ultimately plans to remove. Collins has said the agency is developing plans with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to cut at least 70,000 employees — a number that he has underscored is a “goal.” “Could be more, could be less,” he told lawmakers this week.

On Thursday, in a post on X, Collins pushed back on criticism, calling ProPublica’s reporting “misleading” and saying it was based on “some outdated reports from the internal system VA uses to quickly identify and fix issues across the department.”

In a statement, VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said that Collins was working to fix a “broken bureaucracy” that has long had problems with patient safety and access to care, among other issues. “Unfortunately, many in the media, government union bosses and some in Congress are fighting to keep in place the broken status quo,” he said. “Our message to Veterans is simple: Despite major opposition from those who don’t want to change a thing at VA, we will reform the department to make it work better for Veterans, families, caregivers and survivors.”

Kasperowicz previously told the news organization that the issues in Pennsylvania have been resolved, though locals there with knowledge of the issues said that’s not the case and that the impact is ongoing. Kasperowicz also said in regard to the contracts to maintain the cancer registries that there had been “no effect on patients.” He added that the VA is moving to create a national contract to administer them.

According to some providers, even the temporary disruptions have hurt the care of veterans. One clinical trial to treat veterans for opioid addiction was hobbled by temporary layoffs. “We couldn’t give veterans a tool that could save their lives,” said Ellie Gordon, the CEO of the startup Behavior, which is testing biosensors to alert veterans to the risk of relapse.

Collins touted the cuts in a sometimes-contentious hearing on Tuesday before the U.S Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

“We’re going to maintain VA’s mission-essential jobs like doctors, nurses and claims processors, while phasing out non-mission essential roles like interior designers and DEI officers,” he said in an opening statement. The funds saved will be rerouted into direct health care and benefits for veterans, he added.

Some Republicans at the hearing defended the administration’s proposed cuts. “The VA has become a bloated bureaucracy,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who represents Alabama. “I think most of us will agree with that.”

But Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., pushed back on Collins’ statements, saying that laying off such a large portion of the staff will inevitably involve letting go of health care workers, like nurses and doctors. “You cannot slash and trash the VA without eliminating those essential positions which provide access and availability of health care,” he said. “It simply cannot be done.”

Others at the hearing took Collins to task for a lack of transparency. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, admonished the secretary for refusing to provide a list of the 538 canceled contracts since his appointment. Collins said he would provide the information, but only after it’s finalized.

“We’re looking at every step we can, but also, I’m not going to play it out in a public arena,” he said.

The email said more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.

“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” the email warned, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.”

The administration reversed some of its decisions, allowing some trials to continue for now. Still, other research, including the trials for treating head and neck cancer, has been stalled.

President Donald Trump has long promised to prioritize veterans.

“We love our veterans,” he said in February. “We are going to take good care of them.”

After the Department of Veterans Affairs began shedding employees and contracts, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Secretary Doug Collins, pledged, “Veterans are going to notice a change for the better.”

But dozens of internal emails obtained by ProPublica reveal a far different reality. Doctors and others at VA hospitals and clinics across the country have been sending often desperate messages to headquarters detailing how cuts will harm veterans’ care. The VA provides health care to roughly 9 million veterans.

In March, VA officials across the country warned that a critical resource — databases for tracking cancer — would no longer be kept up to date. As officials in the Pacific Northwest explained, the Department of Government Efficiency was moving to kill its contract with the outside company that maintained and ran its cancer registry, where information on the treatment of patients is collected and analyzed. DOGE had marked it for “immediate termination.”

The VA in Detroit raised a similar alarm in an email, warning of the “inability to track oncology treatment and recurrences.” The emails obtained by ProPublica detail a wide variety of disruptions. In Colorado, for instance, layoffs to social workers were causing homeless veterans waiting for temporary housing to go without help.

The warnings, sent as part of a longstanding system at the VA to alert higher-ups of problems, paint a portrait of chaotic retrenchment at an agency that just three years ago was mandated by Congress through the PACT Act to expand care and benefits for veterans facing cancer and other issues after exposure to Agent Orange, burn pits or other toxins.

Doctors and other health care providers across the VA have been left scrambling and short-staffed amid an ever-shifting series of cuts, hiring freezes and other edicts from the White House.

The upheaval laid bare in the emails is particularly striking because the cuts so far would be dwarfed by the dramatic downsizing in staff and shift in priorities the administration has said is coming.

The VA has cut just a few thousand staffers this year. But the administration has said it plans to eliminate at least 70,000 through layoffs and voluntary buyouts within the coming months. The agency, which is the largest integrated health care system in the U.S., currentlyhas nearly 500,000 employees, most of whom work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics.

Despite an expanded role mandated by Congress through the PACT Act, administration officials have said their goal is to trim the agency to the size it was before the legislation passed.

“The Biden Administration understood what it meant to pay for the cost of war; it seems the Trump Administration does not,” said Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat and chief author of the PACT Act.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show DOGE officials working at the VA in March prepared an outline to “transform” the agency that focused on ways to consolidate operations and introduce artificial intelligence tools to handle benefits claims. One DOGE document proposed closing 17 hospitals — and perhaps a dozen more.

VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz told ProPublica that there would be no hospital closures. “Just because a VA employee wrote something down, doesn’t make it VA policy,” he said in a written statement. But he did say that use of AI will be a big part of what he called VA’s “reform” efforts.

Kasperowicz dismissed the idea that the emails obtained by ProPublica show chaos.

“The only thing these reports show is that VA has a robust and well-functioning system to flag potential issues and quickly fix them so we can provide the best possible care to Veterans,” he wrote.

DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

The White House released a budget proposal last week that calls for a 4% increase in the VA’s budget. That total includes more money for medical care, though a portion of that would be used to pay for veterans to seek care outside the VA medical system.

More answers to the VA’s larger plans may come today, when Collins is scheduled to testify before the Senate Veterans Committee, his first hearing on Capitol Hill since coming into office.

David Shulkin, who headed the VA in Trump’s first term, said the administration is too focused on cuts rather than communicating a strategy for improving care for vets.

“I think it’s very, very hard to be successful with the approach that they’re taking,” Shulkin told ProPublica.

One way local VA officials have tried to limit the damage has been by sending warnings — formally known as an issue brief — to higher-ups. And sometimes it works.

After officials in Los Angeles warned that “all chemotherapy” would stop unless Washington backed off killing a service contract, the VA reversed its decision.

And, amid growing scrutiny, the administration also made some researchers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere exempt from cuts. The laid-off social workers who helped homeless vets in Colorado were also brought back after about a month away from their jobs. Kasperowicz said that four social workers were affected but “their caseload was temporarily redistributed to other members of the homeless team.”

The warnings from officials across the country underscore how the comparatively modest cuts so far are already affecting the work of the VA’s medical system, with the study and treatment of cancer cited in multiple warnings to agency leadership.

“We have absolutely felt the impact of the chaos all around us. We’re already losing people,“ said one senior researcher, who spoke to ProPublica anonymously for fear of retaliation.

Referring to studies, he added: “We’re going to be losing things that can’t restart.”

And while Kasperowicz told ProPublica that the issues in Pennsylvania have been resolved, locals there said that’s not the case and that the impact is ongoing.

In Pittsburgh, two trials to treat veterans with advanced head and neck cancer, which officials in March had warned were at risk because of hiring freezes, have still not started, according to Alanna Caffas, who heads a Pittsburgh nonprofit, the Veterans Health Foundation, that partners with the VA on research.

“It’s insane,” Caffas said. “These veterans should be able to get access to research treatments, but they can’t.”

A third trial there, to help veterans with opioid addiction, wasn’t halted. Instead, it was hobbled by layoffs of key team members, according to Caffas and another person involved in the research.

Regarding the issues with cancer registries, Kasperowicz said there had been “no effect on patients.” He added that the VA is moving to create a national contract to administer those registries.

Rosie Torres, founder of Burn Pits 360, the veterans advocacy group that also pushed hard for the legislation, called the emails showing impeded cancer treatment a “crisis in the making” and “gutwrenching.”

That the decisions are being made without input from the communities of vets they affect is worse, she added.

“If they are killing contracts that may affect the delivery of care, then we have a right to know,” she said.

Last week, as the second Trump administration marked its first 100 days in office, Collins celebrated what he described as its achievements.

In a recorded address, he said that under his stewardship the VA processed record numbers of benefit claims, ended “divisive” spending on diversity initiatives and redirected millions of agency dollars from “non-mission-critical” programs back toward services to benefit veterans.

“We will not stop working to put veterans first,” he wrote in an accompanying op-ed.

Others say Collins has done no such thing. Instead of focusing on veterans, said one VA oncologist, “we’re spending an enormous amount of time preparing for a staffing catastrophe.”

“Veterans’ lives are on the line,” the doctor said. “Let us go back to work and take care of them.”