Elon Musk ‘didn’t learn anything’ during tenure

NEW YORK — Sahil Lavingia put his faith in Elon Musk when he joined the Department of Government Efficiency. He knew about Musk’s successes with Tesla and other businesses and thought the billionaire was the right person to lead an effort to trim and streamline the federal government.

By the time Lavingia left the advisory group, just 55 days later, his opinion of Musk had changed. Musk “didn’t learn anything” at DOGE, Lavingia said, and he “didn’t have an answer” when Lavingia asked what he had discovered while overseeing the project.

“What’s the point of doing this if you’re not learning anything?” Lavingia says he thought at the time.

Lavingia shared his views on Musk and DOGE during an interview on Friday with Straight Arrow News. The interview followed Lavingia’s speech at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in Queens, New York.

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Simple tasks proved difficult

DOGE, established by President Donald Trump to find waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government, hired Lavingia in May as a software engineer in the Department of Veterans Affairs. During his speech at the hackers conference, Lavingia said simple tasks proved difficult, such as determining the identity of his direct supervisor.

“It took a little while to sort of figure out what I was supposed to be doing,” he said.

Little focus was sometimes placed on DOGE’s overarching goals, Lavingia said, including during a virtual meeting that Musk hosted for the organization’s employees. 

He called the meeting “a cool experience” but said it was “not as productive as he had hoped. He described the session as an informal and casual conversation that allowed Musk to “opine on how s—y the government is.”

Leaving DOGE

Lavingia lost his job at DOGE just 55 days after being hired. He was fired after saying in an interview with Fast Company that the federal government, to his surprise, was not as inefficient as he’d expected.

Lavingia said he agreed to the interview because Musk had repeatedly told him and others that DOGE was committed to maximum transparency.

But Lavingia said his access to DOGE’s systems was unexpectedly cut off without explanation.

If given the chance to speak with Musk again, Lavingia told SAN that his top question would be, “Why was DOGE not transparent?”

Lavingia also suggested that Musk prioritized his private businesses, such as Tesla, X and SpaceX, and spent “zero time” with DOGE.

Musk stepped down from his role at DOGE not long after Lavingia’s firing in May. At the time, he defended his work as effective.

“In the grand scheme of things, I think we’ve been effective,” Musk said. “Not as effective as I’d like. I think we could be more effective. But we’ve made progress.

The initiative has proved controversial. Musk initially claimed DOGE would save taxpayers upwards of $2 trillion. As of July, DOGE says it managed to save $52.8 billion by canceling government contracts.

But even that number has been called into question. An analysis by Politico of $32.7 billion in claimed savings found the number to be closer to $1.4 billion, less than 1% of the federal government’s $6.75 trillion budget.