🤖 Broken AI, Broken Priorities: VA Contract Cuts Driven by Botched “Munching” Script

A bombshell report from ProPublica reveals that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) used a flawed AI tool—built in just one day—to identify and cancel contracts across the VA. The tool, written by a programmer with no government or health care experience, flagged over 2,000 contracts as “MUNCHABLE”—a euphemism for expendable.

🔍 But here’s what the tool got wrong:

  • It hallucinated contract values, misreading $35K contracts as $34M
  • It flagged critical services like cancer research support and nursing care tools
  • It only read the first few pages of each contract, missing key context
  • VA staff had just hours to justify keeping contracts, using 255-character blurbs

Even the tool’s own creator admitted,

“I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says… Do not drive into the lake.”

Despite this, VA leadership has canceled nearly 600 contracts so far. And DOGE’s plans to cut up to 80,000 VA jobs remain in motion—with AI potentially used again to drive those decisions.

đź“Ł What this means for us:

This wasn’t modernization—it was automation as a weapon. Contracts supporting real veteran care were targeted based on junk code. And the same logic could be used to justify staff cuts next.

đź“Ž Full story at ProPublica

DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI to Help Kill Veterans Affairs Contracts — ProPublica
We obtained records showing how a Department of Government Efficiency staffer with no medical experience used artificial intelligence to identify which VA contracts to kill. “AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this,” one expert said.
www.propublica.org

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