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.
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.
Not the military, that’s a massive source of expenditure. That’s where I saw the waste happening.
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.
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)
So you agree with him then