Sahil Lavingia Reflects on Short DOGE Stint: Frustrations and Insights

Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad and early Pinterest employee, has shared a detailed account of his brief tenure with DOGE, a temporary government organization initiated by President Trump’s executive order. His diary, published on his website, reveals his experiences and frustrations during his 55-day stint.

Lavingia joined DOGE as a software engineer for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in mid-March. His initial task was to identify wasteful contracts and potential layoff targets within the 473,000-employee agency. He expressed surprise at the strict rules governing layoffs, such as seniority and veteran status, which often superseded performance considerations.

“As a volunteer who had a salary of $0, he was immediately tasked with identifying “wasteful” contracts and the people the VA should lay off, he wrote. But he was surprised to discover facets like seniority and the person’s veteran status (this was the VA, after all) determined who could be targeted. Performance could be factored in lower on the list, in Lavingia’s view.”

Lavingia also described DOGE’s advisory role as similar to that of a McKinsey management consultant, emphasizing that the organization lacked direct authority. “DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the ‘fall guy’ for unpopular decisions,” he says.

This sentiment echoes recent statements by Elon Musk, who described DOGE as Washington, D.C.’s “whipping boy,” often blamed for unpopular decisions. Musk’s views were highlighted in a recent Washington Post article.

Driven by a desire to contribute to public service after campaigning for Bernie Sanders in 2016, Lavingia aimed to develop code that would benefit people on a large scale. He focused on projects such as improving the UX of the VA’s LLM-based chatbot. He mentioned that despite his efforts, he couldn’t get approval to ship anything to production that would actually improve American lives — while also saving money for the American taxpayer.

Despite not implementing large-scale changes, Lavingia open-sourced much of his work, including tools for scanning PDFs for specific terms and analyzing contracts using LLMs. These tools are available on his GitHub page.

Lavingia noted inefficiencies within DOGE, particularly the lack of knowledge-sharing and a centralized software engineering playbook. He said he built a fairly long list of stuff in his less-than-two-month stint but didn’t get a chance to do enormous projects, like “improving the UX of veterans’ filing disability claims or automating/speeding up claims processing.”

His tenure ended abruptly after he discussed his work with a reporter from Fast Company. “I got the boot from DOGE,” he wrote. “Soon after publication, my access was revoked without warning.”

However, in the Fast Company interview, Lavingia also acknowledged that the VA, while slow, generally functions effectively. His experience underscores the challenges of modernizing large government agencies while maintaining their core functionality.

“I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” he says. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine — because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”