Founder Sahil Lavingia says he was booted from DOGE after just 55 days

Summary

Sahil Lavingia has published a diary recounting his time as a member of Elon Musk’s DOGE workforce. It’s a short read — Lavingia’s DOGE stint lasted just 55 days — but it is does provide new details on the temporary government organization formed by President Trump’s executive order. Lavingia is a well-known name in Silicon Valley from his days as an early employee of Pinterest, to his current gig as founder of Gumroad, a platform where creators can sell their goods. He’s also a well-known seed and angel investor. He joined DOGE as a software engineer for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in mid-March, he wrote. What stands out from his account is his surprise that the 473,000-employee government agency had strict rules on who could be targeted in a layoff; and he quickly learned that all things at the VA were not as inefficient as he imagined. He also lamented that DOGE itself isn’t a well-oiled machine. As a volunteer who had a salary of $0, he was immediately tasked with identifying “wasteful” contracts and the people the VA should layoff, 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 view. He also described DOGE’s advisory role as like a McKinsey management consultant, and said DOGE is not responsible for the actions taken by the orgs. “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 is similar to what Musk was decrying this week to the Washington Post. Musk described DOGE as D.C.’s “whipping boy” blamed for every unpopular decision. Lavingia said he joined DOGE after campaigning for Bernie Sanders in 2016 because he dreamed of writing code for the government that helped people at scale. Because his DOGE missives didn’t take much time, he...