Why I joined DOGE

Summary

Introduction

In the June 14, 2025 episode of Planet Money titled "Why I Joined DOGE", host Kenny Malone delves into the enigmatic Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a controversial federal agency initiated during the Trump administration. The episode explores DOGE's mission to streamline government operations, the internal dynamics of its workforce, and the experiences of Sahil Lavingia, a software engineer who joined DOGE with high hopes of making a significant impact on federal efficiency.

Meet Sahil Lavingia

Sahil Lavingia emerges as a pivotal figure in the narrative, providing firsthand insights into DOGE's operations. A former startup founder, Sahil brings a unique perspective shaped by his experience in scaling a company during the era of easy money and low-interest rates. His journey to DOGE is rooted not in politics but in a genuine desire to apply his technical skills to modernize outdated federal systems.

Joining DOGE: Motivations and Expectations

Sahil's decision to join DOGE was multifaceted. As he recounts, "[I'd joined DOGE] it was like I was naively optimistic" about the agency's potential to effect meaningful change without being mired in political agendas ([07:35]). He was drawn to DOGE by the allure of working under Elon Musk, hoping to learn from a leader renowned for his impact across multiple tech industries. Additionally, Sahil's entrepreneurial background, where he faced and overcame organizational bloat during a boom period, informed his belief that his skills could be effectively utilized to slim down federal operations.

Despite initial parental and social pushback—"Most of my friends would be like, what the hell are you doing?" ([01:43])—Sahil was driven by a conviction that his contribution could lead to substantial improvements in government efficiency. He negotiated a short-term stint with DOGE, intending to assess its actual impact before committing long-term, a decision that soon proved to be more permanent than anticipated.

First Days at DOGE

Sahil's onboarding experience at DOGE was unexpectedly mundane. Contrary to his anticipation of a high-octane, Musk-esque environment, he found himself engaged in routine administrative tasks. "Day one was a lot of mundane tasks. Get your ID card, stop by the VA's fingerprinting room," he explains ([12:02]). His casual attire—a T-shirt, shacket, and khakis—stood out amidst his more formally dressed DOGE colleagues, leading to noticeable confusion among VA employees about his role ([12:28]).

Projects and Challenges

Once embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Sahil embarked on projects aimed at identifying and eliminating inefficiencies. One of his notable initiatives was the creation of the Contract Muncher, an AI tool designed to sift through tens of thousands of VA contracts to flag potential cuts. Sahil shares, "We go through the 42,000 contracts that we have, and then hopefully we can cut a bunch of waste," ([21:15]).

However, the implementation of such tools did not proceed smoothly. The VA staff expressed significant concern over the reliability and intentions behind DOGE's interventions. A ProPublica story highlighted the "error-prone AI tool to munch Veterans Affairs contracts," underscoring the tension between DOGE's Silicon Valley-driven methodologies and the established protocols of federal operations ([21:51]).

Sahil's optimistic view clashed with the reality on the ground. "I was hoping... to save a bunch of money," he reflects, only to realize that the VA already had robust systems in place to prevent fraud and waste ([26:00]). This mismatch between expectations and reality led to a growing sense of frustration and disillusionment.

Reflections and Lessons Learned

Throughout his tenure, Sahil maintained a series of audio diaries, documenting his evolving perception of DOGE and the federal bureaucracy. One poignant moment captures his realization that the government, while not perfect, functions with a level of commitment and efficiency he had underestimated:

"There's no easy wins. The government is not corrupt. The government is really not wasteful. The government commits to doing a lot of things for its citizens, but generally it executes on them decently well, full of amazing, smart, hard-working, educated people." ([27:28])

This introspection led Sahil to understand that DOGE's approach, rooted in Silicon Valley's rapid iteration and disruption ethos, was ill-suited to the complexities of federal government operations. He notes, "When you join and you realize... you're no longer the hero, you know, like you're just an employee of this big organization," highlighting the challenges of effecting change within a vast and established system ([28:25]).

Conclusion and Aftermath

After nearly two months with DOGE, Sahil's experience culminated in his departure from the agency. He suspects that his openness about his experiences, including speaking to reporters, may have contributed to his exit. In retrospect, Sahil acknowledges that his impact at DOGE was far less than his initial aspirations, estimating his contribution to federal efficiency savings at around $10 million, significantly below his optimistic projections.

The episode concludes by mentioning that Elon Musk has since left DOGE, and the Trump administration is contemplating making DOGE a permanent fixture within the federal government. Sahil's story serves as a microcosm of the broader tensions between private-sector efficiency models and public-sector operational realities.

Key Quotes

• Sahil Lavingia at [07:35]:

  "I was hoping... the media tends to blow things out of proportion, in my opinion."

• Sahil on Joining DOGE at [07:19]:

  "This was the only way that Trump would allow Doge to exist. Right. Trump is not going to say we're going to ship a bunch of software unless he can say that it's going to cut the deficit or it's going to, you know, save taxpayers a lot of money."

• Sahil Reflecting on Government Operations at [27:28]:

  "There's no easy wins. The government is not corrupt. The government is really not wasteful. The government commits to doing a lot of things for its citizens, but generally it executes on them decently well, full of amazing, smart, hard-working, educated people."

• Sahil on His Impact at DOGE at [29:58]:

  "In the end, I did not end up saving the government billions of dollars. I landed closer to the low end of my projection, somewhere around 10 million."

Final Thoughts

"Why I Joined DOGE" offers a compelling exploration of the intersection between private-sector innovation and public-sector implementation. Through Sahil Lavingia's experiences, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of the challenges inherent in applying Silicon Valley strategies to the intricate machinery of federal government operations. The episode underscores the complexities of effecting systemic change within established institutions and serves as a cautionary tale for technologists venturing into the realm of public service.

Transcript

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[Kenny Malone]

This is Planet Money from NPR. There is this story that seems to have repeated itself over and over the last five months in some federal agency. Longtime employees notice that somebody is inside the computer system requesting access to data, trying to publish new computer code, possibly breaking a government website. What the employees learn is that someone from the Trump administration's secretive cost cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency has arrived.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I think there's so few details right. It's a big story. You know, Trump, Elon Doge, but you don't really know exactly, like, what are they doing? And that's kind of scary, right?

[Kenny Malone]

Sahil Lavingia is able to fill in some of those details because he was one of those people requesting access, trying to push code and terrifying federal employees. As a member of doge, we've all been watching this from afar. The dramatic headlines, the lawsuits, the concerned members of Congress. And today we are going to get to see Doge from the inside, from the software engineer who made the decision to join that group.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I was like, yeah, I think 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, you know, stop talking to me.

[Kenny Malone]

Hello and welcome to Planet money. I'm Kenny Malone. And today I'm joined by NPR correspondent Bobby Allen, who has been part of the NPR team covering Doge. And Bobby, we are delighted to have you here with us today.

[Bobby Allen]

What's up, Kenny? It's my pleasure.

[Kenny Malone]

Today on the show, Bobby is going to bring us access, the inner workings of doge, frankly, in a way that we have never heard before.

[Bobby Allen]

Yeah. And look, I've been trying for months to get anyone from Doge to talk to me on the record. So this is a huge deal for me. I mean, Sahil here is the first person willing to do that.

[Kenny Malone]

And I have to say, like, what Sahil shared with us and what Bobby has brought to us is somehow both exactly like and nothing like what I expected.

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[Kenny Malone]

Podcast why did Sahil Lavingia join Doge is a question with like lots of answers. Frankly, it was not about politics. In 2024, he voted for nobody. He didn't like the politics of either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

[Bobby Allen]

It was a little bit about Elon Musk, you know, a chance to learn from the leader of six major tech companies that was appealing to Sahil.

[Kenny Malone]

But it's also true that joining DOGE was informed by what Sahil had gone through as a startup founder.

[Bobby Allen]

Back in the 2010s, Sahil raised millions of dollars for a company that was sort of like Etsy for digital stuff. It let people sell their ebooks, their music, their online courses. It grew to about 23 full time employees.

[Kenny Malone]

This was happening in the era of easy money, 0% interest rates, when investors were looking for almost any investment with a chance of big return. And Sahil says when he was in the middle of that getting investment, he could not see that context.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Wait, you're telling me that my investors didn't really believe in my ability to generate profits? They just basically had too much money and startups were like this thing that existed that they could sort of put money into because they couldn't get 3% from their bank. And it was kind of almost like an identity crisis.

[Kenny Malone]

The takeaway for Sahil was when money was flowing easily, businesses tended to bloat because that's what happened to his business.

[Bobby Allen]

And eventually his company wasn't growing fast enough, so investors lost interest. He wound up laying off all of his full time employees.

[Kenny Malone]

Which is not to say his company was a failure. It still exists. It earned about $9 million in profit last year. It's just that Sawhill had to find the right size for that company. And if his company got bloated from easy money, well, where else might that be happening? He thought.

[Sahil Lavingia]

And I felt like the same sort of thing had happened with the federal government that like, effectively there was this massive amount of sort of free money that was being generated that would allow for a lot of this waste and buildup to happen. So that's what I expected.

[Kenny Malone]

So from Sahil's perspective, he felt like his experience slimming down his own company could make him particularly useful for Doge's effort to slim down the federal government.

[Bobby Allen]

And if this all sounds a bit like a self aggrandizing tech startup person thinking they could swoop in to save the federal government, well, yes, and to some degree Sahil admits that. And the context here is that back when he was thinking about joining Doge in 2024, it's hard to even remember that now, but at the time, Doge was going to be. Who knew? Exactly. It was vague. It was maybe about cutting government, it was maybe about cutting contracts. It was definitely about efficiency. I mean, that's right in the name.

[Kenny Malone]

And what Sahil hoped was that it was also about, or maybe mainly about modernizing the outdated software running the US Government. He thought he would be especially good at that. And he, you know, he thought all Trump's rhetoric around slashing and cutting and firing was perhaps just rhetoric.

[Sahil Lavingia]

This was the only way that Trump would allow Doge to exist. Right. Trump is not going to say we're going to ship a bunch of software unless he can say that it's going to cut the deficit or it's going to, you know, save taxpayers a lot of money.

[Kenny Malone]

Are you sure you're not just hearing what you want to hear in that scenario?

[Sahil Lavingia]

I mean, I am hearing what I want to hear. I mean, I think unfortunately that's kind of like who I am. Like, I'm just like naively optimistic.

[Bobby Allen]

So weeks before President Trump took office, Sahil went to his wife and said he wanted to join Doge.

[Sahil Lavingia]

She was not happy about it at all. She's like, you know, we have a kid coming.

[Unnamed Contributor]

Right.

[Kenny Malone]

They were expecting their first kid. She'd be like, five, six months pregnant when Trump took office. Admittedly, not the best timing.

[Sahil Lavingia]

And it was tough, honestly. I mean, it was sort of this. I can't think of other places where someone with my skill set, you know, building iPhone apps and mobile apps since I was 13 years old, like, where else in the world I could go to have that level of impact that quickly. And we negotiated it to basically two weeks in D.C. where I would go to D.C. i would really learn if it was all that was cracked up to be. And she was like, look, I do not like that you are doing this.

[Kenny Malone]

You know, was the Doge of it all part of it?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think I. Honestly, I think the biggest thing about it that made it hard was I was going to go work for Trump.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah. Unlike Sahil, his wife did have strong political feelings.

[Bobby Allen]

And again, Trump hadn't taken office yet. Sahil argued, in his words, he could separate the art from the artist. It. If he gets to play a part in modernizing the federal government, it doesn't matter who's in charge.

[Kenny Malone]

His wife did not buy that, but the two agreed that Sahil would sign up for a very short Doge stint. He signed up for just a few months. Then he was contacted by the Trump transition team, where he got an inkling that it might matter who is in charge.

[Bobby Allen]

The team told Sahil they wanted to conduct a political alignment interview. Washington speak for a loyalty test?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Basically, yes. Like, we're not gonna hire anyone who doesn't agree with, like, the mission of the administration. And so I had this interview with them where they asked me a lot.

[Kenny Malone]

Of questions, what kind of stuff?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Like, what is your opinion on tariffs, for example?

[Kenny Malone]

Okay, what is your opinion on tariffs?

[Sahil Lavingia]

I think there are. I mean, now I can tell you, I think they don't seem like a great idea at the time. At the time, I said, I don't know.

[Kenny Malone]

Sahil remembers sort of politically shrugging his way through that interview and questions about Trump's platform. They asked him if he'd voted for Kamala Harri. He told them he had not. We reached out to the Trump administration. They did not respond to our questions about Doge or anything else in this episode.

[Bobby Allen]

Now, the hundred or so people who have joined Doge got there from many different paths. Some were already in Elon Musk's orbit. Former employees of x, Tesla and SpaceX. Others were aligned with Trump and Maga. Sahil, though he's part of this third group, he's good at writing code. And to him, Doge was a once in a lifetime chance to make the software that powers the federal government more spiffy.

[Kenny Malone]

Sahil never heard back after his political alignment interview. But a few months later, he assumed he must have passed when he got called in to start as a Doge member deployed to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

[Bobby Allen]

And by this point, it's March. Doge has made lots of headlines, taking a wrecking ball to usaid, other agencies. This was celebrated in some political corners, and it also led to confusion, lawsuits, very angry town hall meetings.

[Kenny Malone]

No, this was not the version of Doge that Sahil naively, optimistically, had anticipated. It's not what he told us he'd imagined. But Sahil decided he was still going to join. And it might be hard to understand that, but talking to Sahil, you get the sense he is good at compartmentalizing and perhaps hearing what he wants to hear. And when we asked him directly, he said at the time he was thinking that the media tends to blow things out of proportion, in his opinion.

[Bobby Allen]

However, you want to make sense of all of that. On March 17, Saul Hill heads to D.C. for the first official day at Doge. What did you expect? Day one. Like, did you think Elon Musk would be there with his dark mega hat and shake your hand and give you a Doge badge?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Honestly, that's about what I expected.

[Kenny Malone]

But no, there was no central Doge office, no greeting from Elon Musk. It wasn't clear, in fact, who he reported to at all. Seemed to be the only Doge person at the VA, actually.

[Bobby Allen]

And so day one was a lot of mundane tasks. Get your ID card, stop by the VA's fingerprinting room.

[Sahil Lavingia]

They're like, hey, you're on this list of 3 people that is getting fingerprinted today. And I was like, yep, that's me.

[Bobby Allen]

Sahel, this is. It's fascinating to hear all of this because, like, as you're being like, onboarded as a Doge staffer, me as a reporter covering Doge, I'm hearing about the Doge people entering agencies, like, over text message. But, like, you saw it firsthand, like, what did that look like?

[Kenny Malone]

Also, you were it to be clear, I was.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, exactly. I did not have any Doge hoodies.

[Bobby Allen]

Did you dress like a federal government employer? Did you dress more casually?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Like, I dressed? I Wore like a T shirt and a shacket, you know, and khakis. Like I knew.

[Kenny Malone]

Did you say shacket?

[Sahil Lavingia]

A shacket. It's like a shirt meets jacket. You don't know this?

[Kenny Malone]

Were you the only one wearing a shacket?

[Sahil Lavingia]

I was. Almost everybody wore a suit.

[Bobby Allen]

So did you get any looks that were like, oh, this is a Doge guy?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Oh yeah, for sure.

[Kenny Malone]

Because the reputation of Doge had become the reputation of Doge. And so Sahil avoided mentioning it when he met people.

[Bobby Allen]

And at the end of his first day, he got out his phone and started a voice memo.

[Unnamed Contributor]

I'm going to sleep soon. So just recording a quick little diary entry of my first day working for.

[Kenny Malone]

The va. Sahil's day one impressions. Doge seems smaller than he thought. Not exactly the grind to the bone startup vibe he was expecting from an Elon Musk production.

[Unnamed Contributor]

I was hoping to learn more about how Elon runs an org, how you can work super hardcore. You can have like an insane superhuman impact by just running through walls. And does feel a little bit more like a 60 hours a week thing, not 120 hours a week thing.

[Kenny Malone]

In case you're curious, 120 hour week works out to sleeping about 7 hours a night and then working every other minute of the week.

[Bobby Allen]

Salhill would have to settle for 60 hour work weeks. And he keeps up with his audio diaries. It's 10:40pm at the end of each day, he goes back to his DC hotel room. Day two over at Doge, gets under the covers. Day three at Doge and starts recording about his day.

[Kenny Malone]

Day four at Doge, he talks about the people he's meeting.

[Unnamed Contributor]

The cio, Roy, who's awesome.

[Kenny Malone]

What he's learning about how the VA runs.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I came up with a new cool.

[Unnamed Contributor]

Fun logo idea for the VA.

[Kenny Malone]

He's assessing the VA's software situation.

[Unnamed Contributor]

You know, the conversation yesterday was about moving from like 80s era software to like 2000 era software. I don't know, I feel like it's Doge's job to try to pull us into the 2000 and tens. At least 2000 and twenties would be cool otherwise. You just, I don't know, it seems like a wasted opportunity potentially.

[Kenny Malone]

In those first few days. Sahil texts a friend about Doge about how he's feeling confident in his ability to have an impact.

[Bobby Allen]

Sahil reads the text to us.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I say, I think I'm at 80% confidence of $10 million order of magnitude impact 40% of 100 million, 20% of a billion, but 5 to 10% of 10 billion.

[Kenny Malone]

Some big numbers and big confidence. But his argument is that the VA's budget is hundreds of billions of dollars. Sahil's seeing old outdated software IT work that's outsourced and really expensive. And Sahil thought that if he could write software, cut expensive IT contracts and do more things in house, then his impact could be heroic. He could have a 5 to 10% chance of, of saving the government $10.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Billion contributing to the modernization of the US federal government in like a, in a marginal but impactful way that I wouldn't have been able to do as a private citizen. Right. Like a large amount of impact.

[Kenny Malone]

And so Sahil went looking for billions in efficiencies, contracts to cut, fraud to root out and other general doge goals. After the break, what he actually finds.

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[Bobby Allen]

Edu Doge has not been very transparent. As reporters, we have a piece lots of what's happening together, like how we were never really told. When Doge is about to start working in a specific agency, what tends to happen is government employees will start sending us photos of Doge staffers trying to get into buildings or a group of guys who look like coders all of a sudden bossing longtime employees around.

[Kenny Malone]

And in that vein, Doge has never shared a playbook exactly for cutting the federal but reporters like Bobby Allen here have pieced together that there seem to be roughly three phases to Doge's work.

[Bobby Allen]

Yeah, phase one, Doge workers fanning out across the government in hoodies and shackets and getting into place.

[Kenny Malone]

Phase two, there tends to be a kind of audit. They compile data. They knit together different data sets. They try to get a complete picture of the money in and the money out of each agency.

[Bobby Allen]

And phase three, of course, the cuts, mass layoffs, contracts canceled, grants suspended. Now, is Doge literally making those cuts? Are they identifying them and someone else decides? Is what they're doing even legal at all? That is all being debated right now.

[Kenny Malone]

But generally speaking, those three phases do seem to be the phases. And it's a kind of Silicon Valley Elon Musk takeover playbook. And I think a lot of what we've seen of Doge is how that Silicon Valley ideology is butted up against the realities of how the federal government works.

[Bobby Allen]

And you could really see this through Sahil's story. Now, he didn't really have a specific boss. He was getting requests from multiple people. He was to some degree left on his own to figure out how everything worked at the VA.

[Kenny Malone]

So one day he was poking around the VA's computer code to learn the software and learn what he could do.

[Sahil Lavingia]

It was updating Twitter to X in the footer of va.gov like the place.

[Bobby Allen]

On the VA website where it might say follow us on Twitter. He changed Twitter to X.

[Sahil Lavingia]

The reason I was doing that wasn't because I cared. I still say Twitter colloquially, but it's just I wanted to learn how the Website was deployed.

[Kenny Malone]

Harmless enough, Sahil thought.

[Bobby Allen]

But people at the VA said, you can't just go messing around with a live website. This is the federal government. Even small changes to a website have lots of rules, like just writing X makes the word too small and potentially violates laws and rules about making the site accessible to people with visual impairments.

[Kenny Malone]

VA staffers were like, what? What is going on here? They told reporters at the magazine Wired, which reported on Sahil how some DOGE guy was trying to push his code, possibly messing up important websites, and how even something small like changing the word Twitter to X has ramifications that he does not understand.

[Bobby Allen]

Another example, Sahil was asked to help look at the tens of thousands of existing contracts that the VA has for possible cuts. And he's like, oh yeah, that's a super easy software problem. He talks about it in one of his audio diaries.

[Unnamed Contributor]

And then we have the contract muncher. We go through the 42,000 contracts that we have, and then hopefully we can cut a bunch of waste.

[Bobby Allen]

Sahil built an AI tool. He named it the Contract Muncher that could read the PDFs of VA contracts and flag ones his bosses might want to consider cutting.

[Unnamed Contributor]

It took me, whatever, 15 minutes. So tomorrow should be a really good day where we actually get to utilize the contract muncher.

[Bobby Allen]

Maybe sounds good in theory, but this really freaked people out. This became the subject of a ProPublica story. Doge developed error prone AI tool to munch Veterans affairs contracts.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah, they checked his code, felt like it was sloppy, would misinterpret contracts, used a shoddy AI model. And people at the VA were very concerned about someone who knew nothing about the VA creating something that would help inform huge decisions about cuts.

[Bobby Allen]

He'd built a tech company, solution, moved fast, built quick, and to him it might not have been perfect, but a human was still going to decide if a contract would get cut or not.

[Kenny Malone]

It didn't matter why Sahil had joined DOGE in the first place. He was a disruptive force in the va. And it seemed everyone could see that.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Like, I remember one software engineer at va, you know, career employee, he slack messaged me and was like, everyone is terrified of you. Like every time you really, like, everyone is terrified. I don't know if he was being a little facetious, but like, he was like, you know, people know who you are. They talk behind your back. Not in any like, this guy's an evil person, but like he's, you know, representing this evil force or whatnot.

[Bobby Allen]

Could you blame Them, though. I mean, if you're reading the headlines, it's like these DOGE staffers are just. Are just laying off people left and right. Like, I'd be terrified too.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah. I mean, I saw that we had no authority to riff anybody, like, and so I was like, we don't.

[Kenny Malone]

What is riff?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Reduction in force. So to.

[Kenny Malone]

And what is reduction in force?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Basically, to. To fire people, Like, I see.

[Kenny Malone]

So that's like two levels of abstraction from saying fire people.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, basically.

[Kenny Malone]

Do you understand why to the other people in the department, it felt and looked like a person coming in and breaking things now?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, I get it.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, 100%. I do think there's some confirmation bias at play too, you know, and maybe I should have worn a suit, but, yeah, I understand why. We look the way we did, and hopefully we didn't break anything. You know, hopefully, like, hopefully we didn't actually break. It looked like we were breaking stuff, but hopefully we didn't.

[Kenny Malone]

Sahil sees lots of this stuff differently now. And one of the big turning points came the one time he got called into an E meeting. Apparently that's what they call meetings with Elon Musk.

[Bobby Allen]

Sahil was excited. This E meeting went from about 8pm to midnight.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Maybe like, 60 people around this, like, big table, mostly standing for four hours. Yeah, I was leaning on a wall, for sure.

[Bobby Allen]

Sahil had joined DOGE in part to learn how Elon Musk works and sees the world. And during this meeting, there was an E Q and A session time to ask Elon questions.

[Sahil Lavingia]

So I asked him, I said, like, what. What have you learned last week? Like, what? You know, what are you learning about how the federal government works, basically? And he basically just sort of said, like, it's just like a fractal of terribleness, and you just can't believe how terrible it is until you peel back the next layer and it's even more terrible. And I just was kind of like, that's cool, I guess, but, like, that doesn't help me do my job. I was expecting a little bit more of a concrete answer.

[Bobby Allen]

Sahil was unimpressed. He'd gone into the meeting looking for a clear mission, hoping to get energized.

[Kenny Malone]

Hoping.

[Sahil Lavingia]

And I was like, honestly, I was super disappointed. I was expecting, like, a lot more of a plan of attack, of like a sort of war room where we're like, this is what we're trying to get done. This is where we've failed. This is where we've succeeded, you know, a little bit more of, like, A team effort.

[Bobby Allen]

Sahil says it wasn't that at all. He left the meeting feeling like, what are we even doing here?

[Kenny Malone]

And then there's this one last story we're going to tell about Sahil's time inside Doge, about a fraud investigation.

[Bobby Allen]

Yeah. Another big goal of DOGE is to save money by finding fraud. And waste. Sahil says one day a call comes down from, like, a boss's boss saying, drop everything.

[Sahil Lavingia]

He asked us to look into this. This person who may be receiving disability payments. Even though they're 137. I'm like, awesome. Like, that's, you know, that would be cool to find fraud. Like, that's a good. You know, I think everyone would agree that we should not participate in that.

[Kenny Malone]

So Sahil starts calling around, finds a VA employee who says, give me a second. Let me go cross check this possible case of fraud in a different database.

[Sahil Lavingia]

He comes back to us and says, hey, you know, this guy's in our database. He's 75.

[Kenny Malone]

That is a more reasonable age to be.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah. And when he said that, I was like, okay, 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 1900 or something.

[Bobby Allen]

Sahil says that was the one case of fraud that the DOGE team investigated at the VA during his limited time there.

[Sahil 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, make sure that they're alive. Make sure that they're, you know, they've gone to a doctor's appointment in the last three months, you know, that sort of thing. Like, these checks exist. This is actually what makes the government sometimes, like, expensive to run, is that you have to check all these things before you give people money. Yeah, I think it was. It was just a feeling of like, darn it, you know, like, it would have been really nice to, like, come in and save a bunch of money.

[Kenny Malone]

And he was realizing the same kinds of things about his big dream of going there and modernizing outdated systems. The more he dug around and talked to people, suggested ideas, and the more he would learn that, like, oh, federal employees are already working on some of these things, and it's not that they don't know they need to be fixed. It just, like, takes a long time.

[Bobby Allen]

There's this pretty Amazing moment in Sahil's audio journal where he seems to realize all of this in the moment, not just about the software and the fraud, but about maybe all of his assumptions. Here he is talking into his phone late one night.

[Unnamed Contributor]

So another thing I learned, it's not like the. There's no easy wins. The government is not corrupt. The government is really not wasteful. The government commits to doing a lot of things for its citizens, but generally it executes on them decently well, full of amazing, smart, hard working, educated people. Is it too nice to those people? Maybe. Is it too nice? Maybe. Is it. Could it be run more efficiently? Probably. But is efficiency always the goal?

[Sahil Lavingia]

No.

[Unnamed Contributor]

I don't know.

[Bobby Allen]

Sahil joined Doge running these calculations about his own personal impact. Could he save Hundreds of millions? 10 billion maybe? And he told us that baked into those numbers is the assumption that the federal government wasn't going to fix things without someone like Sahil swinging in from the outside.

[Sahil Lavingia]

But when you join and you realize, oh, they're actually trying to do the thing that I already wanted them to do, that is sort of like, it's good in a sense, right? It's great that they're already focused on modernization 100%. But also it means that, like, you're no longer the hero, you know, like you're just an employee of this big organization.

[Kenny Malone]

And when you talk to Sahil, admittedly about a very small amount of time at one department, it sounds like his lesson isn't that the federal government is run perfectly or that it is the exact right size, but that it is much better than he had imagined and there just are not easy ways for someone like him to come in and save $10 billion.

[Sahil Lavingia]

And I think that's a lot of, you know, a lot of like the sort of the Doge sentiment, I think it's probably what got Elon in over his head potentially was like, you know, like Trump, I think, is also good at this, like convincing other people that they're the hero of their story and that this is like the unique, singular opportun, like only you can fix this, right? It's sort of like even better than only I can fix this.

[Bobby Allen]

One day in May, after almost two months at Doge, Sahil opened his work computer, tried to log onto a work site, and his credentials didn't work anymore. No one even confirmed this to him, but it seemed like he'd been let go.

[Kenny Malone]

He suspects it's because he lives his life like an open book and had talked to a reporter about Doge, which You know, obviously he's still doing today.

[Bobby Allen]

In the end, Sahil did not end up saving the government billions of dollars. He says he landed closer to the low end of his projection, somewhere around 10 million.

[Kenny Malone]

And a lot of that actually came from a thing Sahil did that the official DOGE X account bragged about. Do you remember the tweet?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, the tweet was something like the VA was spending $380,000 a month on basic website modifications. The VA will do this internally. A software engineer spending 10 hours a week.

[Kenny Malone]

And is all of that true to the best of your knowledge?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Well, the problem is I was that software engineer and I'm no longer there.

[Kenny Malone]

Meaning he has no idea if that is true anymore.

[Bobby Allen]

Elon Musk, of course, has left Doge rather dramatically. And the Trump administration recently announced that it intends to try to make Doge a permanent government presence.

[Unnamed Contributor]

Foreign.

[Kenny Malone]

If you're new to Planet Money, welcome. We have been covering Doge and other big recent shakeups in the federal government. If you liked today's episode, you should listen to our episode on the last time the US Tried to shrink the federal workforce during the Clinton administration. We'll include a link for that in our show notes. And if you have any tips about Dogecoin, you can contact Bobby on signal at B A l l y n 77. That is b a l l y n 77.

[Bobby Allen]

This episode was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler and Emma Peaslee. It was edited by Jess Jiang.

[Kenny Malone]

It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Neal Rauch. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Kenny Malone.

[Bobby Allen]

And I'm Bobby Allen. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

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