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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.
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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.
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.
Thing is, it wasn’t helpful or useful, and it’s clear whoever ordered it had no clue what was going on. We used maybe 1-2 boxes of those calibrators a year. I probably threw out 6 dozen boxes, all the exact same lot and expiration date, that had been sitting in the back of the -80C freezer for years.
That money could have gone towards any one of the actual lifesaving research programs we had going, but instead it went to some vendor.
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 is probably also money wasted because they’re using old tech. Not that upgrading is free, but often upgrades have far more features and maintaining them is much cheaper than maintaining something that was obsolete decades ago.
But, you can’t just parachute in a contractor or a “whiz kid” to upgrade the social security or internal revenue systems. The upgrades will take a decade, and that’s not because government is inefficient. It’s because people’s lives are literally on the line. If you “move fast and break things” then Grannie Jones doesn’t get her check and she can’t afford food.
I do wish governments put more of an effort into staying up to date on computer systems. It would make hiring people easier. And, ideally, governments could be part of the open source / free software ecosystem. I think it would take a few decades of pain to become more modern. But, once it was done I think hiring would be easier and the software would be more efficient and easier to run. Most of the time when a government publishes something, it immediately enters the public domain. So, you could potentially have the government running Kubernetes clusters and adding features to Kubernetes itself. I think you’d also find a lot of open source / free software devs would like to work for the government, getting a steady paycheck and good benefits while contributing good code to open source projects. Right now those people don’t want to work for the government because having to work on decades-old stacks is soul destroying.
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.
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.
And DOGE just created more waste because ALL those federal workers fired, are still getting paid without actually performing any work. They are still getting paid until September. When they most likely will sue again. So the actual savings were ZERO. Idiots always forget you can get sued in the US and DOGE AI equation didn’t take into account the ton of lawsuits it created.
This comment implies DOGE is for what it says it’s for.
DOGE is a political purge and fiscal responsibility is its smokescreen.
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.
