Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden is calling on the Veterans Administration to reinstate a contract to track cancer rates among veterans in Oregon, Washington and elsewhere in the West — a contract he said was “rashly” canceled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
According to the VA, about 50,000 new cancer cases are reported among veterans each year. About 11,000 of those are reported in the Northwest region, according to the contract solicitation.
The registry contracts spotlighted by Wyden are used by experts to track cancer patterns, drive research and respond to emerging trends. Some cancers, including breast and prostate cancer, occur at a higher rate among military veterans than in the general population. Some cancers found in veterans are associated with exposure to unsafe levels of chemical compounds used in wartime, such as Agent Orange, a defoliant that was widely used during the Vietnam War.
The government has canceled at least four VA cancer registry contracts around the country, including one for the agency’s Northwest region. Canceling VA cancer registry contracts would disconnect cancer trends among Northwest military veterans from state and national cancer databases,said a cancer registry advocate. And that could block decisionmakers and researchers from responding effectively,
Tracking cancer trends using the registries “lays out the blueprint on how we’re really going to beat cancer,” said Lori Swain, executive director of the Alexandria, Va.,-based National Cancer Registrars Association. She said cancer registries also provide physicians and researchers with useful information about cancer screening and other aspects of care .
Cancellation of the cancer registry work is “mindless and cruel,” Wyden charged in a June 10 letter to VA Secretary Doug Collins. Wyden asked Collins to reinstate the contract. The VA hasn’t responded.
VA spokespersons didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Lund Report.
The VA canceled the contracts as part of the wave of reductions conducted by the Department of Government Efficiency set up by Musk, the billionaire who helped elect President Trump. The department has terminated thousands of contracts and leases across the government and forced layoffs of thousands of federal employees. The cancellations included 447 VA contracts, according to the VA’s April report to Congress.
In the Northwest, that includes a $1.3 million contract with Quality Registry Services LLC of Manakin-Sabot, Va., for monthly review of “disease indices, pathology reports, radiology reports, treatment logs, and other computerized methods to identify reportable cancer cases.”
In announcing the VA contract cancellations, the agency declared “The termination of these contracts will not negatively affect Veteran care, benefits or services.” Yet the agency has also canceled contracts to perform medical coding work and to run a suicide prevention hotline, though it later rescinded the hotline cancellation.
It’s difficult to assess the impact of the overall cuts on frontline services to VA patients because the VA has not yet provided a list of terminated contracts to lawmakers such as Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the ranking member of the Senate’s Veterans Affairs Committee.
“We are here because we’ve been stonewalled and slow walked,” Blumenthal said at a forum held on the cuts earlier this month..”The Administration has failed to provide us with basic facts about those contracts.”
The Department of Government Efficiency publishes an online dashboard that summarizes the cuts and estimates their savings. The cuts amount to $108 billion, the department claims, but analysts say the dashboard and its “Wall of Receipts,” which the department has revised repeatedly, is highly inaccurate. After setting up and overseeing the department, Musk left the government and returned to his private-sector businesses amid a hostile public exchange of messages with the president and Republicans in Congress.
Meanwhile, in the Northwest, military veterans are being ill-served by the cuts, Sen. Wyden wrote to Collins.
“By terminating this contract, you have prevented the VA cancer registry from reporting accurate and timely data that would help cancer surveillance and shape our medical community’s response to veterans battling cancer.”
The VA’s Northwest region includes Oregon, Washington, Alaska, most of Idaho and parts of northern California and western Montana.
