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.
Government contractors are the largest source of waste and it should be no surprise. Anything purely government-run has been forced to function on shoestring budgets for decades now. Meanwhile the government pays top dollar for anything farmed out to private business because of how the contracting system is set up, largely thanks to unfettered lobbying.
This is why the military budget is over a trillion dollars now. Even as overextended as the US military is, defense contracts get the lion’s share. The military itself is stuck working with minimums.
If lobbying and contract bidding rules were fixed we would see crazy opportunities to make budget cuts.