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.
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.