In less than a week, a former Air Force logistician lost 50% of his business revenue and was forced to lay off 45 employees, including other veterans, when the Department of Veterans Affairs canceled a slew of contracts with his business.
Building on his logistics training in the Air Force, Robert Betters opened RB Consulting, Inc., a supply chain and information technology management firm that contracts with the VA and other agencies. Last week, seven of the company’s contracts were canceled by the VA among the $2 billion of cuts ordered by the new VA Secretary Doug Collins.
Betters, who started his business 20 years ago, told Task & Purpose that he doesn’t “fault the government for anything,” and that he understands the direction that the VA and federal government are going with recent cuts.
“I just worry about my employees,” Betters said, who is president of the National Veteran Small Business Coalition’s board of directors, NVSBC, an organization that advocates for veteran entrepreneurs in federal contracting. “My key concern is that now that a lot of people are being laid off, can people find jobs in a timely manner?”
Collins said the money from the canceled contracts would be redirected to veteran health care and benefits, though the VA has not yet provided a plan for how those spending changes would work.
In some ways, Betters said, his company’s work was aimed at the same goal of improving VA services for vets.
One of the company’s canceled contracts was to develop surveys for veteran disability evaluations in order to improve the claims process. Another was to improve VA hospital supply chains for medications and other medical products.
Scott Jensen, executive director of the National Veteran Small Business Coalition said the decision-making behind the cuts is neglecting the “human beings behind all of this” and said it’s hurtful to the veteran small business owners who are being pained as “pariahs or as slouches” and “wasting” or “stealing from the American people.”
“They didn’t go and hold a gun to anybody’s head to say give me money. They followed the process. They either applied for a job, or the federal government solicited for someone to fulfill the requirements of a contract,” Jensen said. “They were given a mission, they’re fulfilling the mission. If the mission is no longer needed, or was considered waste, OK, that’s acceptable. But don’t hold them accountable for fulfilling what someone else asked them to do.”
‘That’s what contracts are for’
In a video message announcing the cuts, Collins said that $2 billion was going to contractors to “create” PowerPoint slides, record meeting minutes, give coaching and training, and provide executive support.
“Folks, if you don’t know how to run PowerPoint slides, learn. It’s a tutorial on your computer. Go learn for free,” Collins said. “Take your own notes. Wow, 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.”
A majority of the contracts fell under the “professional services” category, which can include a federal agency’s need for a unique set of skills or expertise from legal, economic, financial or technical fields. Betters said some of his contracts fell under this designation, including IT- work of analyzing, writing software, and transferring data out of the VA’s legacy systems into digital or modernized ones.
The work, he said, was important and required more specialized expertise than VA staff could handle — perfect for contractors like his firm.
“If I can’t hire enough people in the government and I still need the work done, then I’ll hire contractor support because once the work’s done, I can always let them go,” Betters said.
“If the goal is to implement something and sustain it and slowly weed off, then that’s what contracts are for.”
Last year, the company was awarded a $22 million VA contract to digitize paper copies of customer service surveys the VA had mailed out to gauge customer satisfaction around veteran disability evaluations — a primary task at the heart of the VA’s mission, which is also performed by contractors.
“Our goal was to get more responses back from the veterans and the active duty personnel who got disabilities and provide a status of how your medical examiner treated you,” Betters said. “We want our veterans to make sure that they’re being treated properly, especially when they don’t work for the VA. These examiners are not VA examiners initially, so they’re hired by the VA to do that.”
As a young airman, Betters worked in medical logistics. After the Air Force, he found similar work in private logistics for the Navy and Army, and then most recently with the VA.
“My ties have been to the same career field for the last 30 years, so I haven’t really left. I’ve worked with a lot of people that I worked with back in the 90s that are in the medical logistics community,” he said.
One of his recently canceled contracts was to build a master catalog for the supply chains of 172 VA hospitals. The catalog compiled data from all of the agency’s sources for medication and medical products into one place. The catalog was intended to give the thousands of employees in those hospitals a central place to find up-to-date and available medications and medical products, like prosthetics, saving the time and money of each worker researching where to order supplies from, Betters said.
“There’s a lot of different manufacturers out there for different products. If you don’t have an updated catalog that has the right pricing, has the right contract information, has the right product number information, you’re probably overspending,” he said. “A supply chain is only as efficient as the systems you have in place.”
Beyond saving administrative costs for staffers, Betters said, the project was meant to increase access to care for patients.
”What happens to the veteran is, they could be turned away if you don’t have enough resources [and] people that are helping you with your supplies at the hospital,” he said.
Veterans contracting with the VA
Veteran-owned businesses have long enjoyed a leg-up in getting federal contracts. Contracts for veteran-owned businesses that meet certain requirements are set aside by federal agencies under two categories: Veteran-Owned Small Business, VOSB, or Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, SDVOSB.
In fiscal year 2025, the VA had a goal set by the SBA to give 5% of its contracts to SDVOSBs. Because of a 2016 Supreme Court decision, the VA is also mandated to award contracts to veteran-owned companies as long as there are at least two that can fulfill the contract requirements.
Jensen said that, because of the VA’s work and its set-asides, many vet-owned contracting firms end up with most of their income tied to the agency.
“A lesson learned is to make sure you have a diversified portfolio, but that’s very hard when [as an example] 74% of the money coming to veteran-owned businesses comes out of the VA because of the policies and laws that exist,” Jensen said. “Where is a veteran-owned business supposed to go if 74% of [it is] coming out of the VA?”
Jensen said the experience of RB Consulting, Inc. — cut contracts and layoffs — is the reality of other coalition members and could continue to grow with more VA downsizing. He cited one SDVOSB that lost 70% of their value after the Tuesday announcement and by Wednesday morning laid off 70 employees.
The owners, he said, are “looking at a very real requirement of declaring not only business bankruptcy but personal bankruptcy because of the financial investment they have in the company,” Jensen said.
Barbara Carson, the director of a Syracuse University program offering entrepreneurial assistance for veterans and military families said the cuts have been bigger and faster than many vet entrepreneurs planned for.
“Those that thought they were taking risk mitigation steps, it may not have been enough,” Carson said. “Reasonable people are really being hit here.”
Jensen said there’s still a lot of anxiety and uncertainty among other veteran small business owners because of VA official comments indicating that it was “just the beginning.”
On Monday, the VA announced it was canceling 585 additional contracts it called “non-mission-critical or duplicative,” and that it was the “first step in a comprehensive audit” of roughly 90,000 contracts worth over $67 billion.
“What’s the next shoe to fall?” Jensen said. “What we’d really like is just to be able to interact with leadership and understand the priorities and understand what’s coming so that it’s not quite as shocking as it was.”
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