DOGE Fires Operative After He Admits the Government Was Already Pretty Efficient
One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired.
Sahil Lavingia, a tech founder and erstwhile software engineer with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), revealed in a recent blog post that he had "got[ten] the boot" from the agency after telling Fast Company last month that the federal workforce had turned out to be way more efficient than he anticipated.
In that initial interview, the Gumroad founder said he was impressed to find that his coworkers at the Department of Veterans Affairs "love their jobs" and worked hard at them — an honest admission that seems to have cost him his job.
Just a day after the FastCo interview was published, Lavigina found that his "access" — to the VA's computer networks, presumably — had been "revoked without warning."
"My DOGE days," the jilted techie wrote, "were over."
Lavigina also revealed in the blog post, which detailed his 50-day tenure at the agency, that he didn't end up getting much done — a slap in the face to the agency's mandate to save taxpayer dollars and abolish the "tyranny of bureaucracy," as Musk put it earlier this year.
"I didn't make any progress on improving the [user experience] of veterans' filing disability claims or automating/speeding up claims processing, like I had hoped to when I started," the former DOGE staffer lamented. "I built several prototypes, but was never able to get approval to ship anything to production that would actually improve American lives — while also saving money for the American taxpayer."
He also suggested that DOGE staffers were more like middle managers than actual workers.
"DOGE was more like having McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I'd imagined," the fired engineer recounted in reference to the McKinsey Corporation, the management consulting firm that allegedly fixed bread prices and formerly employed presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.
"The public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible," he continued. "In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions."
It sounds a lot like DOGE jobs are the ultimate a waste of time and taxpayer money — though thankfully, Lavigina volunteered to work there for free.
More on DOGE: There's Apparently Some Serious Drama Brewing Between Elon Musk's DOGE and Trump's MAGA
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