Improve the VBA acquisition workforce and private-sector outreach

Research notes

• The Federal Register phrase search for “acquisition workforce” across VA documents since 2025-01-20 returns one hit, the Uniform Guidance conformity proposed rule (2026-05-29, 2026-10817), which is not about staffing.
• VA’s acquisition-related Federal Register traffic in the window is a run of VA Acquisition Regulation clause information collections (gray-market clauses, information-security clauses, construction provisions, technical industry standards) — routine PRA renewals, and leads at most.
• On the “few of the top companies have contracts with the VBA” half: the sweep was re-run on 2026-09-03 and the open half is answered, negatively. Every VA contract and IDV with an action date in the window whose description matches “disability examination” returns sixteen FY2026 funding orders, from $754,312,386 down to $260,174,837 and totalling about $6.75 billion, and every one goes to the four incumbent examination vendors already under contract since 2024-12-20 (see #1788). Of the eighty-three award rows returned, the ten that are not those four are support suppliers orders of magnitude smaller — MITRE, RB Continuum, Green-Gate Technology, Cathexis, The Ross Agency and the Public Health Foundation — and only Ross ($2.08 million, 2025-12-10) and the Public Health Foundation (~$265,000 a year) start inside the window. There is no new top-tier entrant. “Few of the top companies have contracts with the VBA” remains true on the record. A negative moves no rung, but the note can now say the sweep was run and what it found.
• Two limits, stated: the query is keyword-based over award descriptions and is not a complete census of VBA’s contract portfolio; and the awarding subtier on VBA’s own awards is “Department of Veterans Affairs”, not “Veterans Benefits Administration”, so a subtier-filtered query returns an empty result set that reads as a clean negative (see #1788’s notes).
• The read-queue row asking for a citable human-readable page is answered in the negative: usaspending.gov/award/… was re-checked on 2026-09-03 at every rung including the full Chrome header set and returns a JavaScript shell with fifteen characters of prose. No Evidence follows from this read; the facts live here and in the chapter log.