An engineer didn’t expect to be caught in the bureaucratic paradox when he joined the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But after publicly stating that he found fraud or waste “relatively nonexistent” in the US’ federal ecosystem, he found himself without a job shortly after.
Former DOGE engineer says federal waste and fraud were ‘relatively nonexistent'(Representative image/AFP)
“I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,” Sahil Lavingia told NPR while recounting his 55-day stint within DOGE.
The development comes as former DOGE chief Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump are engaged in a very public feud days after the Tesla CEO’s exit from the Oval Office as a “special government employee”—tasked with saving taxpayers’ money by making the federal system more efficient.
How the engineer’s DOGE stint ended in irony
Lavingia joined DOGE in March, hoping to modernise clunky government websites. “I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunities to cut waste,” he added.
“I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse,” the engineer said. “There’s minimal fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent.”
So when a blogger reached out, he talked about his experience of working with the government. Transparency, after all, was supposedly one of DOGE’s founding principles, he said, adding that Musk had on multiple occasions stressed on this particular principal.
“He had a bunch of questions about me working for DOGE and I felt that Elon was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent,” Lavingia told NPR.
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Lavingia claims that shortly after the blog post went up, he received an unexpected email. His DOGE access had been revoked. No warning. No explanation. Just silence. “I didn’t get notified. I was basically ghosted,” he said.
Lavingia quipped, “Letting someone go for being transparent in the most maximally transparent organization is a little bit entertaining.”
Coming from Silicon Valley, the founder of the online sales platform Gumroad was prepared for inefficiency, reported NPR.
He joked that companies like Google and Facebook, filled with investor money, often have “lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.” In contrast, he said, federal agencies operate under intense scrutiny, which may ironically force them to be more efficient.