This was almost certainly a payoff. I don't know many website managers who charge $350,000-$380,000 per month to give the hamsters a kick.

The contract has now been cancelled.

DOGE finds Veterans Affairs paying $350K per month for website modifications

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), under the leadership of Elon Musk, revealed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had been spending an astounding $350,000--$380,000 per month on minor website updates before canceling the bloated contract.

Key Details:

The VA paid a contractor nearly $380,000/month for minor website modifications.

DOGE confirmed the contract was not renewed; the work is now done by one internal staffer in 10 hours/week.

The revelation follows DOGE's termination of 113 federal contracts worth $4.7 billion in total.

Diving Deeper:

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the agency created by executive order on President Donald Trump's first day in office, has uncovered yet another striking example of wasteful federal spending. This time, the target is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which until recently had been paying nearly $380,000 a month for relatively simple website modifications--work that a single staffer now handles internally with just 10 hours of effort each week.

DOGE broke the story via a post on X, formerly Twitter, praising the VA for not renewing the contract. "VA was previously paying ~$380,000/month for minor website modifications," the agency wrote. "That contract has not been renewed, and the same work is now being executed by 1 internal VA software engineer spending ~10 hours/week."

The left is celebrating that their literal domestic terrorism campaign against Musk has worked, but Musk and the Administration say he was always expected to step away from the job after 130 days, which is the term he was appointed to.

I don't know -- maybe he'd have sought an extension if not for the terrorism. I'm not sure if the terrorism worked or not.

The left sure is happy that their terrorism may have worked. Note that for your records.

Did you hear? A temporary government employee whose legally limited term of employment is 130 days is going to leave government employment after 140 days?!

Shocking, I know. Somebody in the government is going to obey the law, which explains why the news media is printing screaming headlines that Elon Musk is leaving government employment.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk loudly proclaimed when Elon Musk was hired that he would be in his position for 130 days. Given how things work in recent years, it is shocking that somebody in the government is obeying the law. That almost never happened under Obama and Joe Biden.

Yesterday, X was filled with celebration that Elon Musk had been pressured out of the government by all the attacks on Tesla. It was all started by a POLITICO "scoop" that the Trump administration had had enough. Trump liked him, but his cabinet did not.
...

Every single of word of that "scoop" was a total invention. It was a Narrative, and everybody in the media picked it up, amplified it, and created a story that was essentially a hoax as invented as the "fine people" hoax.

POLITICO didn't make a mistake. The invented--or rather spread an invented hoax for somebody who cooked it up--because the left needs to create the sense that their coordinated opposition is working. Trump is losing momentum, his cabinet is revolting, and Musk has become a liability. It is part of their plan to cripple Trump by crippling Musk.

The left is doing what it always does when it's defending their zealous religious-cultist devotion to an unpopular position -- they're lying. They're claiming that they all really, really, rilly want to cut government spending too, they just don't like the exact way it's currently being done. But if it was done in the "right way," of course they'd support cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from the budget, Silly-Head!

And when you ask them for a list of cuts they support, they go silent. Though they might say "We need to stop giving away tax bonanzas to billionaires," which isn't a cut in spending but an increase in taxes. (Which they count as "a cut in spending," because they claim the government is writing checks to the rich.)

Of course their main lie has been "We support cutting the waste, fraud, and abuse, because of course we do, but we don't like that this billionaire Elon Musk is doing it, looking at IRS transactions so that this near-trillionaire, literally the richest man who has ever lived on earth for all of history, can jot down Granny's bank routing information so that he can nab her sweet $1,300/month Social Security payments.

And also, they don't like that "no one elected Musk," which is true of every single Administration official in every single Administration, except it's less true of Musk, who appeared at Trump campaign rallies with Trump promising that if we elected him he'd appoint Musk as head of DOGE.

My point is this: The left is going to have to quickly change its lies post-Musk to claim some other objection to the exact way government spending is being cut, and who it's being cut by.

But don't worry -- the truth-seeking media will call them out for changing their story about why they oppose these particular cuts. The media will not let the Democrat Party get away with its usual lies, don't you worry one second Buddy!