Veteran-owned Businesses Are Feeling Burned By Trump’s Contract Cutting

A nine-year Navy veteran started walking dogs when he lost his translation business. One 10-year veteran of the Army furloughed half of their staff while another considered selling their car to make payroll.

Ten months into the Trump administration, the nation’s military veterans doing business with Washington are feeling the sting of President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal government and DOGE’s crusade to combat what it calls waste, fraud and abuse. The fallout has hit hundreds of veteran-owned businesses across the country.

Two-thirds of the contracts DOGE canceled at the Department of Veterans Affairs this year were with veteran-owned businesses. Some of those contracts were helping the VA register cancer patients or provide health care support to veterans, services the VA said are now being performed in-house. And few constituencies draw more support from across the political spectrum than veterans.

Concerns about veterans more broadly triggered a rare split between Republican lawmakers and the Trump White House earlier this year when billionaire Elon Musk’s efficiency team started laying off thousands of career staff at the VA, stoking fears about agency services. Some of the agency's more dramatic staffing plans were later reversed but DOGE also cut billions of dollars in federal spending and contracting that are still rippling across veteran-owned businesses — companies particularly exposed because the federal government has long given preferences to those companies.

“They don't care about veterans, they just care about veteran votes,” Jeremy Casanave, who served nine years in the Navy, said of the Trump administration. “DOGE had not a clue what they were doing.”

Casanave had a translation business, Prescient Technologies, that went under this year after losing more than a dozen federal contracts. He and his wife took money out on their house and started a dog-walking business to get by, he said.

DOGE has canceled at least 1,251 contracts with veteran-owned businesses, or just under 10 percent of all contract terminations posted on its public list of records — its “wall of receipts” — according to a POLITICO analysis. This has hit at least 550 of these businesses, and the vast majority of these contracts were held by veterans disabled in the line of service. Both conditions are self-reported and verified by the Small Business Administration for small companies.

“No one has done more for our Veterans than President Trump,” said White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly, who cited the president’s work to reinstate veteran benefits, open new health clinics and process disability claims. “All of the administration’s actions to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse help ensure more resources and better care for Veterans — which is exactly who the VA is intended to serve.”

But some veterans running their own businesses are feeling left behind by the administration’s swift approach to cuts.

“It made me question the government that I've been working so hard to support,” said a 10-year Army veteran and CEO who furloughed half their staff, granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the government against their business. The CEO, who also had worked at the VA, lost multiple contracts in the wake of DOGE cuts, including one to support veterans’ health care. “My whole life is in support of the government. It has been in various capacities, now and before.”

Supporting veteran-owned small businesses is a priority across the federal government. The VA and the Small Business Administration, for example, both have longstanding, percentage-based goals for contracting with them.

SBA has a goal of granting 5 percent of all federal procurement dollars to small businesses owned by service-disabled veterans, worth up to $34 billion in the fiscal year that ended in September. The VA’s goal for fiscal 2024 was to award 17 percent of all contract dollars to small veteran-owned businesses.

That made it almost impossible for Musk’s chainsaw to miss these companies.

Canceling contracts with veteran-owned businesses allowed the government to save a purported $3 billion, according to DOGE’s records as of Oct. 4. DOGE’s assessment of savings is based on questionable math and does not translate into immediate savings for taxpayers.

A DOGE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment but the White House has previously said the “wall of receipts” is up-to-date and accurate.

The true number of contracts and veteran-owned operations that lost federal business is likely higher because DOGE doesn’t track its impact across sub-contracts, which multiple business-owners interviewed for this report also hold. But the VA said the agency is more able to provide better care, more efficiently after terminating other work.

“Under Secretary Collins, VA has reviewed tens of thousands of contracts the department had in place, cutting thousands of wasteful and duplicative agreements and redirecting the savings into better care for Veterans, families, caregivers and survivors,” VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz wrote in an email, noting the changes helped finance $800 million in infrastructure improvements to VA health facilities. Casanave's business had contracts with multiple agencies and Kasperowicz said at least one was cut because it was tied to the now-rescinded federal Covid emergency.

DOGE claims an additional $39 million in savings from cutting grants meant to benefit veterans, and a further $177 million from VA contracts that were not directly with veteran-owned businesses but benefit veterans after their service.

Despite the administration's assurances, the cuts have rattled some Republicans.

“As a veteran, I am troubled any time a veteran-owned business is impacted by budget cuts. I am actively working to review and reverse these cuts,” Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.), a former Navy helicopter pilot and member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a statement. Kiggans' district lost at least 70 contracts among veteran-owned businesses.

The six major nonprofit veteran services organizations either declined to comment or did not respond to requests to do so.

“You can't trust this administration,” said Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.), whose district spans several counties in the Washington, D.C., exurbs — and where DOGE claimed its biggest savings from canceled agreements with veteran-owned businesses. It’s also where Casanave’s business was located.

“You can't trust DOGE, and you may not even be able to trust working within or with government moving forward if we continue these types of cuts, freezes, and cancellations of contracts,” Subramanyam said.

Earlier this year, the VA moved to cut contracts it said were superfluous.

VA Secretary Doug Collins posted a video on X in February claiming up to $2 billion in savings for cutting things like consulting and workforce training contracts.

“I’ve been given this report says we were taking millions of contracts — in dollars in contracts — to create things like PowerPoint slides and meeting minutes,” he said. “I’ll send you one of my pencils if you need one, but we’re not paying millions of dollars for consultants to do this for us.”

Most business owners reached for this report who served in the military acknowledged longstanding problems with federal contracting that predate Trump. But it was DOGE’s breakneck approach that troubled many of them.

“For us to just get our foot in the door and then the secretary to say, ‘Hey, we just cut all training and consulting contracts’ — that basically capped us at our knees,” said one business-owner, a five-year Army veteran who was also granted anonymity due to fear of retribution against their business.

The CEO who spent a decade in the Army and worked at the VA said the interest in hiring consultants for low-level support at the agency is a “calculated” one intended to free up agency employees for more important work.

“Can it change? Should it change? Probably. But as abruptly as they did it was not the right way to do it,” the CEO said.

Another contractor previously providing cancer registry services to the VA, Best Practices Group CEO Peter Whalen, said he believes their $217,000 contract was cut because it was labeled as a “consulting” award, which he said was a clerical error.

In reality, the company was registering and tracking health outcomes among veterans with cancer, the company’s director of operations Sandra McDonald said. (The VA said Best Practices Group’s contract was terminated because it was duplicative and said the cancellation did not impact cancer registration services.)

After the company’s contract was canceled, the VA consolidated a lot of that work into a new multibillion-dollar deal that Whalen believes will limit future opportunities for his small business, causing him to fear for the future of his company.

“I'm mad. Yeah, I'm mad. I'm really mad because it’s not fair. I'm sick of veterans getting screwed over by the VA,” Whalen said.

Multiple contractors reported that there have been exceedingly few contracting opportunities posted by the VA since the start of the Trump administration. Now that the 2025 fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, it could be months before companies can regain federal business.

The VA’s Kasperowicz said the agency spent “about the same” among contracts with veteran-owned businesses in fiscal 2025 and 2024, $12 billion in 2024 and $11 billion in 2025, according to federal spending records.

"VA only pursues contracting opportunities when it makes sense for the department and the Veterans we serve,” he said.

But the agency has posted fewer contract opportunities under the Trump administration than it has on average in the last five years, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal procurement data.

That does not bode well for veteran business owners who are already struggling.

The five-year Army veteran business owner said they considered selling their car in order to make payroll.

“I have no choice but to proceed,” they said, “or I have nothing.”

Had this business owner not gotten "lucky” by finding some amount of work outside of the federal government, “I would have lost my house — my retirement and my life savings already gone, right?”

Casanave, who started the dog-walking business, is still trying to figure out his next steps — and assess what went wrong. He still owes money to translators he’d hired for work he lost last year, he said.

“All we did was help people, so we thought that we were secure,” he said. “The bulk of our work was for veterans. The rest of it was for [federal] employees.”

Methodology:

The last update to DOGE’s “wall of receipts,” where it posts a subset of canceled contracts, grants and lease agreements was updated Oct. 4. POLITICO joined this information with federal procurement data detailing businesses self-reported qualifications, such as whether they are veteran-owned or service-disabled veteran-owned. When available, old versions of the DOGE data were used for USAID contract cancellations that are now stripped of identifying information on the DOGE website due to “legal reasons.”