NPR’s Juana Summers talks with Sahil Lavingia, who worked for the Department of Government Efficiency as a software engineer assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about his experience.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
On March 17, a man named Sahil Lavingia joined the Department of Government Efficiency as a software engineer assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs. On May 9, 55 days later, his credentials were suddenly revoked. On his website, he’s now written about his brief experience working for DOGE, the cost-cutting unit formerly affiliated with Elon Musk and still associated with the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to cut programs and people from the federal government. And Sahil Lavingia is here to talk to us about it. Welcome.
SAHIL LAVINGIA: Thanks for having me.
SUMMERS: So I just want to start with this question. How is it that you ended up working with DOGE?
LAVINGIA: Yeah. So I – friend of mine, he had a friend that was a software engineer for DOGE. And I applied for the U.S. Digital Service back in 2015 or so. And I’ve always wanted to ship code for the federal government. DOGE was the current way to do that. So I asked him for an intro. I spoke to him on Signal. I spoke to a few other DOGE folks on Signal, and a few months later, they offered me a role at VA.
SUMMERS: You mentioned that you had initially applied to work at the U.S. Digital Service, which is the department that DOGE sort of took over that was then rebranded. And I know that you were out there campaigning for Bernie Sanders back in 2016, and DOGE, of course, is this sort of signature Day 1 initiative, chief initiative, of the Trump administration. Some people might be surprised that you would want to go and work there.
LAVINGIA: Yeah. I mean, I think the consistency is I really believe that software can play a really important role in making being an American citizen, like, a better experience. You know, people are frustrated with the tools and technology that they have to use when they interface with the U.S. federal government. And I’ve always been interested as a software engineer ever since I was, like, a sophomore in high school. It’s hard for me to think of a better way to have a larger impact as someone who writes code every day and enjoys, you know, designing and building products, web applications, iPhone applications than working for the U.S. federal government.
And Bernie, Hillary, Obama, Trump, it doesn’t really matter to me if the work is making it easier to pay taxes or, you know, making it easier for veterans to collect benefits. I like when my software gets used by a lot of people and people send me nice emails. In this case, people weren’t sending me the nicest emails, unfortunately. But they also didn’t really know what I was doing. They saw DOGE, weren’t a fan of certain things that they were associated with. But I think at the end of the day, like, the role of the U.S. Digital Service is to improve the UX of being an American, which is pretty exciting. And anyone who lets me do that, I will try to work for, even if my friends and family aren’t huge fans.
SUMMERS: I want to ask you about something that you wrote on your website. You wrote that 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. Can you give us an example of what you mean by that?
LAVINGIA: Yeah. So I think most of what I expected of it was from reading what was in the news and what was on Twitter, X. And it felt like DOGE had a lot of power, that DOGE was making a lot of controversial decisions, that DOGE was moving really, really fast. When I joined DOGE, I realized that while we were looped into a lot of things, effectively, the agencies are the ones in charge. The agencies are the ones making the decisions to cut staff, to cut contracts. And DOGE, and Elon, was able to absorb a lot of the negative headlines that otherwise would have fallen on Marco Rubio or the agency heads or Trump or other folks in the administration.
SUMMERS: As you’ve documented, by Day 3, you were compiling HR information for upcoming layoffs. The VA secretary has said his agency is targeting a 15% reduction in force, which multiple reports peg it somewhere between 70- and 80,000 people. So I want to ask you, if those people see you as someone who helped the Trump administration effectively push them out of a job, what would you say to them?
LAVINGIA: Yeah. I’d say, I mean, at the end of the day, I did help build org charts such that VA executives could understand, like, what their organization looks like. I don’t believe that the VA will cut 15% of their staff. It’s not actually possible, given that the vast majority of the VA is actually the 170 hospitals that serve veterans, and the VA has also said that they will not cut any jobs related to nursing, clinicians, physicians – anyone providing direct veteran care. When I’ve looked at the HR data that I had access to, it’s just fundamentally not possible to cut 15% of the staff.
SUMMERS: One of the big things that we’ve heard Elon Musk say, and the president say, as they’ve described the work of DOGE is that its goal is to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, which they allege the federal bureaucracy is rife with. As you did more and more of this work in the time that you were involved with DOGE, did you find the federal bureaucracy to be rife with waste and fraud and abuse?
LAVINGIA: Frankly, no. I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There’s minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is – I think we have a bias is people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.
The government has been under sort of a magnifying glass for decades. And so I think, generally, I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was. This isn’t to say that it can’t be made more efficient – elimination of paper, elimination of faxing – but these aren’t necessarily fraud, waste and abuse. These are just rooms to modernize and improve the U.S. federal government into the 21st century.
SUMMERS: When you did identify inefficiencies at the VA, I wonder, did you often identify the public interest reasons for why things might have been the way that they were?
LAVINGIA: Definitely. The sort of first thing that comes up anytime you question, you know, why does a veteran’s disability claim take 133 days on average to process – the answer is not because people are just sitting around doing nothing all day long. It’s because there are a lot of rules and regulations that Congress has put in place over decades that just make it very, very complicated.
SUMMERS: You were a part of DOGE for 55 days. Can you walk us through what happened before you were let go?
LAVINGIA: Yes. So I, probably stupidly, was asked by a – not even a journalist but a writer who just has a blog about my business going open-source, and I spoke to him. You know, 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. That’s something he said a lot in private and publicly. And so I felt, OK, cool, I’ll take him at his word. I will be transparent and, you know, sort of an ask forgiveness not permission sort of thing. I said mostly that the government was not as inefficient as I was expecting. And then, my access got revoked pretty shortly after. I didn’t get notified. I was basically ghosted, and I just got an email notification that my access was no longer valid.
SUMMERS: I would just wonder if you’ve considered the fact that the Trump administration, it appears, let you go for speaking openly about your job, where we should note Elon Musk pledged maximum transparency, whereas you point out you wrote open-source code for anyone to access. Those things seem to be in conflict.
LAVINGIA: I think that perhaps I was let go for another reason – right? – that…
SUMMERS: What’s that? What do you think?
LAVINGIA: I don’t know. I can’t think of any other reason. I’m just thinking that, like – unfortunately, they did not tell me directly that the reason I was let go was because of my transparency. So I don’t know if irony is the right word, but I do think that it’s maybe, as Elon says, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, and, you know, letting someone go for being transparent in the most maximally transparent organization is a little bit entertaining.
SUMMERS: We’ve been speaking with developer and angel investor Sahil Lavingia, who founded the online marketplace Gumroad. He joined the U.S. DOGE service for a brief time earlier this year. Sahil, thank you so much.
LAVINGIA: Thank you.
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