Sahil Lavingia, a former employee of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) told NPR on June 5 that federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency were “relatively nonexistent” during his time at the Department of Veterans Affairs:
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 as 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.
Lavingia was fired from DOGE after only 55 days because he gave an interview a blogger, which he believed lined up Musk’s demand to be transparent:
Unfortunately, they did not tell me directly that the reason I was let go was because of my transparency. 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 letting someone go for being transparent in the most maximally transparent organization is a little bit entertaining.
(Source: NPR, Image: Sahil Lavingia)