A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) says he was surprised by “how efficient the government was,” and was quietly dismissed after publicly saying so.
Sahil Lavingia, founder of the tech platform Gumroad, joined DOGE in March to help modernize the Veterans Affairs systems, according to NPR. As a coder with no strong political affiliation, Lavingia said he simply wanted to improve the user experience of government services.
Despite backlash from peers over joining a Trump-era agency, he hoped to make a positive impact. But after just 55 days on the job, his access was revoked following a blog interview in which he shared that he saw little evidence of fraud, abuse or waste during his time at the agency.
“Abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent,” Lavingia told NPR, adding that what many see as waste is more about modernization opportunities than mismanagement.
“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,” he continued.
DOGE, originally led by Elon Musk under President Donald Trump, emphasized transparency. Lavingia said Musk routinely repeated that principle in private and public. So when he gave a blog interview praising the government’s relative efficiency, he thought he was following the agency’s values. Instead, he was cut off without notice.
His firing raised eyebrows given DOGE’s supposed mission to be open and reform-minded. Lavingia said he never received a direct explanation for his dismissal, only a revoked login.
“Letting someone go for being transparent in the most maximally transparent organization,” he noted wryly, “is a little bit entertaining.”
Originally published on Latin Times
