“I think that mistakes were made.”
A software engineer with zero healthcare or government experience built a contract-review AI in two days using outdated models, and DOGE used it to flag over 2,000 VA contracts for cancellation. The tool hallucinated contract values, read only the first 2,500 words of each document, and misread $35,000 contracts as worth $34 million. Canceled contracts included cancer research equipment and nurse quality tools. The developer compared his own creation to “driving into a lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake,” which is a remarkably honest self-own for someone who helped gut veterans’ healthcare.