A former employee of DOGE has made a shocking claim about what he found while working for Elon Musk.
The ex-staff member once worked for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was headed up by Musk until recently.
While not technically a government department, the organization was purported to act as an outside advisor to the president on federal spending.
During his time in the role, Musk hacked away at the federal budget, mostly making cuts through canceling contracts and making mass layoffs.
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Now, one former employee has lifted the lid on his time with DOGE, where he revealed that he found that fraud, abuse and federal waste which he was tasked with uncovering were ‘relatively nonexistent’ during his stint at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Speaking to NPR’s Juana Summers, Sahil Lavingia said: “I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was.”
He went on to say: “I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There’s minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is — I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.
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“The government has been under sort of a magnifying glass for decades. And so I think, generally, I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was. This isn’t to say that it can’t be made more efficient — elimination of paper, elimination of faxing — but these aren’t necessarily fraud, waste and abuse. These are just rooms to modernize and improve the U.S. federal government into the 21st century.”
When asked why he was let go from his role at DOGE, Lavingia said: “I, probably stupidly, was asked by a — not even a journalist but a writer who just has a blog about my business going open-source, and I spoke to him. He had a bunch of questions about me working for DOGE and I felt that Elon was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent. That's something he said a lot in private and publicly. And so I felt, OK, cool, I'll take him at his word.
“I will be transparent and sort of ‘ask forgiveness not permission’ sort of thing. I said mostly that the government was not as inefficient as I was expecting.”
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However, shortly after, the former worker claimed that he had his access revoked without any prior notice, adding that he was ‘basically ghosted and I just got an email notification that my access was no longer valid’.