A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were “relatively nonexistent” during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,” Sahil Lavingia told NPR’s Juana Summers.
Lavingia was a successful software developer and the founder of Gumroad, a platform for online sales, when he joined DOGE in March. Lavingia said he had previously sought to work for the U.S. Digital Service, the technology unit that was renamed and restructured by the Trump administration. He told NPR that he just wanted to make government websites easier for citizens to use and didn’t really care which presidential administration he was working for, despite protests from his friends and family.
The rampant fraud, waste, and abuse is plain to see. It’s every goddamned republican swine in government.
Any fraud they uncovered was likely run-of-the-mill stuff that would’ve been found even without DOGE, probably with less overhead than DOGE as well. Thinking some 20yo without even a college degree will come in and immediately spot fraud is laughable.
As for waste, Musk thinks anything that doesn’t directly contribute to “the product” is waste. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of his factories had outhouses and water troughs to save on plumbing.
No shit. Pretty much the only bloat in government is the private contracts—usually for the unauditable “defense” budget.
If you’ve paid any attention, government programs are usually forced to operate with absolutely minimal funding. And the people who make it all work anyway—often with personal dedication and sacrifice—are heroes.
Having worked for the government, I assure you there is absolutely waste happening on a huge level. One time I threw out about $50k of lab equipment calibrators that someone clearly bought a ton of at the end of the year to use their whole budget so they didn’t lose it the following year.
Nobody suggested reworking how budgets work though, so clearly the mission was not to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse.
government programs are usually forced to operate with absolutely minimal funding
Not the military, that’s a massive source of expenditure. That’s where I saw the waste happening.
So you agree with him then
bought a ton of at the end of the year to use their whole budget so they didn’t lose it the following year.
This kind of thing is infuriating. I’ve seen that before as well (not the tossing, but using money they didn’t have to to, to not lose it next year)
Yeah, that is terrible! Spending $50k on something that might be helpful or useful in the future! We should have used that money to purchase one JDAM kit so we can bomb more people.
Thanks to Musk and Trump, they’re now unemployed heroes.
And the only Medicare fraud is done by people like senator Rick Scott on the provider’s side.
Health insurance companies. Far and away the worst of the worst when it comes to medicare fraud. Ever seen an itemized hospital bill? That, but worse. And it happens to tens of millions per year.
You dummy…when insurance companies do it, it’s smart business. I’ve learned the system coniders fraud until the correct amount of lobbying bribes are paid, the fraud dies and boom smrt business.
There are also too many contractors in non-defense agencies. It’s really terrible because it both increases costs, slows things down (in my opinion), and means that there is little retention of skilled workers.
Oddly, the main way to save money and increase efficency is to expand the government workforce. Although, I do think there needs to be more effort on how we focus government work.
What is this LOSER Talking about? We were spending MILLIONS Feeding Starving American Children! That’s HUGELY Wasteful!
-Republicans who are OK with Elon giving HIMSELF Billion Dollar Contracts!
This administration’s idea of “waste” is determined by the groups of people the programs help.
Which we have found are largely comprised of gullible morons.
Half them, half the most vulnerable people.
Yeah, I’ve gotten really tired of seeing victims of this administration get kicked by opponents of this administration, based on sweeping generalizations of “you all voted for this.” The kickers are not the helpers.
And that is most likely why they are now a “former” DOGE engineer.
Government contractors are the largest source of waste and it should be no surprise. Anything purely government-run has been forced to function on shoestring budgets for decades now. Meanwhile the government pays top dollar for anything farmed out to private business because of how the contracting system is set up, largely thanks to unfettered lobbying.
This is why the military budget is over a trillion dollars now. Even as overextended as the US military is, defense contracts get the lion’s share. The military itself is stuck working with minimums.
If lobbying and contract bidding rules were fixed we would see crazy opportunities to make budget cuts.
Boy, I could have saved you a bunch of time, energy, and money if you had just ASKED me first.
A lot of the inefficiencies come from being understaffed. You end up waiting on another department to do something so you can move forward. The work on site mandate and the buyout have made this insanely worse. I work as a consultant in the public sector for tech. The team I’m working with now went from 5 people down to two and they have one that they have hired but is still waiting for the paperwork to go through to start working. They were hired in December. The on site mandate fucked this military base. They have 8000+ employees and ~4500 parking spots. Everyone is basically expected to show up late and the police stopped giving parking tickets because it was too much work. With everyone on base the internet access is almost unusable until about 4:30 pm when people start leaving. We put in a request for a service account that our product requires 3 weeks ago and are still waiting for it because that team downsized and can’t keep up… And on, and on, and on…
These over worked, under staffed teams are spinning plates right now. When those plates come crashing down they’re going to end up hiring IBM, VMware, General Dynamics, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc… consultants to fix the mess and get them back to spinning. That’s going to be so much more expensive than just keeping those previous people on staff. It’s going to be wild in 6-12 months imo.
“When those plates come crashing down they’re going to end up hiring IBM, VMware, General Dynamics, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc… consultants to fix the mess and get them back to spinning” That’s not a bug it’s a feature those contract will go to someone who “donated” to the Taco.
It’s just going to be all the same people that he cut contracts from. What they did was get a list of the companies they were spending the most with and started cutting contracts. They’re going to end up having to go back to those same companies. This time with desperation.
Cool, you ruined a lot of people’s lives…congrats. Hope it was worth it I guess. Glad you learned something or whatever.
But also, thank you for the candid (if defensive) admission and insider’s perspective. That took guts, given what social capital you must know it will cost.
I’m not risking much social capital - I read the article below a few weeks ago and it really stuck with me. The story of Caitlin and her family…it’s just so tragic. I don’t know her or her family and I know a lot of things are tragic, but this is so senseless. For whatever reason it resonated with me and I can’t stop thinking about her. I hope her husband and daughter are doing as best they can. But people like this ignorant douchebag need to know that directly or indirectly, they did this. And they get the opportunity to be like “oops guess I was wrong” and keep going through life like “oh well” and make more mistakes and in the meantime they ruined so many lives for what, ultimately? For greed and ego. It’s just all so sad.
Original link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/05/20/federal-workers-trump-mental-health/
Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/fiuMl
They’re weren’t saying that about you.
The only bloat in the government is the defense department and means testing. Defense spending needs a 75% reduction in spending, nearly all in private contracts. And 99% of means testing. Just creates a whole bureaucracy just to get access to what society and government is for.
Well, better late than never. The question is if they’re going to connect the dots and realize everything else the right wing says is nonsense and projections.
what?!? no! it’s like there’s policies and laws and rules and watchdogs and thinktanks and oversight and good people that actually do their fucking job to prevent that kind of thing!
but a few silicon valley assholes think they can step into any environment and start shitting gold.
even if there were waste and fraud it’d take you months, if not years, to learn the systems and policies enough to find any of it let alone get it fixed realistically.
the US, which I am a part of, just showed the perfect example of cut off our nose to spite our face. but we didn’t stop at the nose. we took the whole fucking head off with all the brains and now the asshole and dick is the only one left to attempt to make any descison. and we’re just going to keep fucking ourselves.
Refused to get onboard with the false narrative and got fired. Shocking.
