Jen Kiggans chairs the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Her job, by title, is watching for things that hurt veterans and calling them out.
In November 2025, Politico published a count of what DOGE had done to veteran-owned businesses. Two-thirds of every contract DOGE cancelled at the Department of Veterans Affairs that year was with a veteran-owned company. Around 550 veteran-owned businesses nationwide were hit.
Virginia's 2nd District — Kiggans's district, built around the Navy in Virginia Beach and Hampton Roads — lost at least 70 contracts among veteran-owned businesses. More than any oversight chair would want in her own backyard.
Her statement to Politico:
"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."
That's a fine sentence. The problem is everything she said before a reporter counted.
What she said while it was happening
Kiggans didn't discover DOGE in November 2025. She was there at the start.
In December 2024, before Trump had even taken office, she publicly praised a "productive first meeting" with Elon Musk and DOGE co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy, the Virginia Mercury reported.
In February 2025, as mass firings hit Virginia — one of the largest concentrations of federal employees in the country — she called the cuts "so necessary." That was said while the workers being cut were struggling to find new jobs.
Later that year, on the John Fredericks Show, she told laid-off federal workers that there were other jobs out there and that they needed to "go out and get them."
That is not a person who was blindsided. That's a person who watched it happen to her own district for eleven months and cheered.
$8.3 million, and who it was for
The contracts weren't the whole of it. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress cited by the Mercury, DOGE terminated more than $8.3 million in grants and leases tied to Virginia's 2nd District — including funding connected to veterans' services and facilities, and programs serving military families.
Hampton Roads is not a district where that's an abstraction. It's a district where the Navy, the shipyards, the VA and the contractors around them are the economy. Kiggans knows this better than almost anyone in Congress; she's a former Navy helicopter pilot married to a retired F-18 pilot.
The businesses on the other end of those cancelled contracts were run by people like the ones Politico interviewed: a nine-year Navy veteran who started walking dogs after losing his translation business, a ten-year Army veteran who furloughed half their staff, another who considered selling a car to make payroll. Several would only speak anonymously, afraid the government would retaliate against what was left of their business.
Some of the cancelled VA contracts had been helping register cancer patients and provide health care support to veterans. The VA says that work is now done in-house.
The oversight chair who didn't oversee
Here's the part that should bother her constituents most.
Kiggans has a gavel. She runs the subcommittee that exists specifically to investigate the VA and hold it accountable, and she has used it plenty — hearings on VA bonus payments, on mental health policy, on the Hampton VA Medical Center.
When the largest disruption to veterans' services in years came from her own party's White House, what her constituents got was a statement, issued after a reporter did the counting. She has not pointed to a hearing she called on it, a letter she sent, or a contract she got restored.
"Actively working to review and reverse these cuts" is the sentence a member reaches for when there is no formal action to name. If any of those 70 contracts came back, her office hasn't said so.
The politics arrived on schedule
By December 2025, even Elon Musk was calling DOGE only "somewhat successful" and saying he wouldn't do it again. The Virginia Mercury asked Kiggans for an interview about her support for the program and sent her a list of detailed questions about its impact on her district.
She didn't respond.
Virginia's 2nd is rated a toss-up — the only one in Virginia, by the nonpartisan Inside Elections. In November she faces Elaine Luria, the retired Navy commander she unseated in 2022, who won the Democratic primary on August 4, 2026.
That's the timeline, laid end to end: praise DOGE in December 2024, call the firings "so necessary" in February, tell the fired to go get other jobs, absorb 70 contract cancellations and $8.3 million in lost grants, issue a sympathetic statement when Politico calls, decline the interview when the Mercury calls, run for re-election.
The cost of "efficiency" in a Navy town
There's an argument to be made for cutting wasteful federal contracts. It's not a crazy position, and plenty of veterans hold it.
But the argument only works if the person making it is willing to look at what actually got cut and say whether it was waste. Kiggans has never done that. She endorsed the cuts in the abstract, and when the specifics landed on veteran-owned businesses in her own district, her response was that she was "troubled."
Being troubled is not oversight. It's a feeling. Her constituents gave her a gavel.
Source
DOGE had a cutting spree. 550 vet-owned businesses felt it. — Politico, November 22, 2025, and Musk's doubts about DOGE spotlight political risks for U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans — Virginia Mercury, December 17, 2025. Photo: Francis Chung / POLITICO.
