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What did the Department of Government Efficiency actually accomplish under Elon Musk? One of Musk's former DOGE workers is going public with his account. From the Planet Money podcast, NPR's Bobby Allyn brings us his story of the first phase of the Trump administration's efforts to cut spending.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Sahil Lavingia joined DOGE as a techie idealist. He's a software engineer who wanted to improve government systems from the inside. He's not a huge Donald Trump fan, but admired Elon Musk. He knew joining DOGE wouldn't go over well with everyone.
SAHIL LAVINGIA: Obviously, like, a lot of my family would not be excited about it. Most of my friends would be like, what the hell are you doing? But hopefully, I could go back and be like, well, this is what the hell I did. I shipped this code. It made people's lives better. And hopefully, they wouldn't stop talking to me.
ALLYN: After about two months assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs, he says he was able to cut some contracts, and he worked on the VA's internal chatbot. But when it came to fighting fraud - a stated mission of DOGE - he often fell short. Take, for instance, a call he got one day from one of Musk's deputies.
LAVINGIA: He asked us to look into this person who may be receiving disability payments, even though they're 137.
ALLYN: Lavingia thought, OK, that doesn't sound right. He made a few calls, had a longtime VA career employee dig into it.
LAVINGIA: He comes back to us and says, hey, you know, this guy's - in our database, he's 75.
ALLYN: When he passed this along to Musk's deputies, he never heard back. But he says the confusion was over two government computer systems miscommunicating, not egregious fraud.
LAVINGIA: I know what happened. Right? Like, as a software engineer who's worked on software and seen data, like, you know, some software languages - like, there was a null value that then got set to 1,900 or something.
ALLYN: Lavingia was hoping for more easy wins to show DOGE was really making a difference, like obvious examples of government bloat or fraud that could be quickly rooted out. One of his big takeaways is that while government is not perfect, there are already many checks in place to combat waste and abuse.
LAVINGIA: I mean, I really believe that, like, we hoped there would be more fraud, that, like - I think we underrated how many checks there exist when you pay somebody. I think, actually, there is a check somewhere in the system. And that check proves - you know, makes sure that they're alive, makes sure that they're - you know, they've gone to a doctor's appointment in the last three months.
ALLYN: Last month, Lavingia talked about his DOGE work to the publication Fast Company. He told the magazine that government wasn't as inefficient as he had expected. He thought he was fulfilling Musk's push for DOGE to be transparent.
LAVINGIA: And he would say transparency was the goal - maximally transparent was the goal. And then when I tried, I got canned.
ALLYN: The Trump administration didn't respond to a question about his termination. Later in May, Musk left DOGE, too, along with some of his top advisers. DOGE staffers are still spread out across federal agencies, working as in-house consultants. And they're collecting and combining massive amounts of sensitive data and helping to lead efforts to fire workers and cancel contracts. But its work is far less high-profile now that Musk isn't in charge. Lavingia, for one, thinks Musk's exit means DOGE will eventually just be folded into other cost-cutting efforts in the Trump administration.
LAVINGIA: I don't think Trump is going to just cancel DOGE, but I think it will sort of fizzle out - you know, ends with a whimper, not a bang sort of thing.
ALLYN: The White House says cutting waste, fraud and abuse will continue to be a goal of the administration. But in a statement affirming this mission, it left out one word - DOGE.
Bobby Allyn, NPR News.
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