DOGE used flawed AI tool to 'munch' Veteran Affairs contracts, report claims
Source: The Independent
Friday 06 June 2025 21:37 BST
Employees in the Department of Government Efficiency reportedly used a flawed artificial intelligence model to determine the necessity of contracts in the Department of Veterans Affairs, resulting in hundreds of contracts, valued at millions of dollars, being canceled.
Given only 30 days to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order directing DOGE to review government contracts and grants to ensure they align with the president’s policies, an engineer in DOGE rushed to create an AI to assist in the task.
Engineer Sahil Lavingia wrote code which told the AI to cancel, or in his words “munch,” anything that wasn’t “directly supporting patient care” within the agency. However neither he, nor the model, required the knowledge to make those decisions.‘“I’m sure mistakes were made,” he told ProPublica. ”Mistakes are always made.”
One of the key problems was that the AI only reviewed the first 10,000 characters (roughly 2,500 words) of contracts to determine whether it was “munchable” – Lavingia’s term for if the task could be done by VA staffers rather than outsourcing, ProPublica reported. Experts who reviewed the code also told ProPublica that Lavingia did not clearly define many critical terms, such as “core medical/benefits,” and used vague instructions, leading to multiple critical contracts being flagged as “munchable.”
Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/doge-flawed-ai-veteran-affairs-b2765364.html
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