Former DOGE Engineer Says He Was 'surprised' by 'how Efficient' the Government Is

Sahil Lavingia was a successful software developer and the founder of Gumroad, a platform for online sales, when he joined DOGE in March.

Lavingia said the overall message at DOGE was transparency and a vibe of “ask for forgiveness, not permission.” So, when a blogger asked for an interview about Gumroad, he agreed. And when asked, he talked about his work at DOGE, including how little inefficiency he saw compared to what he was expecting.

Lambert here: On “It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” “Grace Hopper did employ and help to popularize the expression by 1982, but it was already in circulation”(Quote Investigator).

“Elon [Musk] was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent,” Lavingia said. “That’s something he said a lot in private. And publicly. And so I thought, OK, cool, I’ll take him at his word. I will be transparent.”

Shortly after the interview was published online, Lavingia got an email. Just 55 days into his work at DOGE, his access had been revoked.

On the lack of fraud and spending abuse he saw

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.

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.

On what happened before he was let go

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.