\n<\/p>\n
Sahil Lavingia has published a diary<\/a> recounting his time as a member of Elon Musk\u2019s DOGE workforce<\/a>. It\u2019s a short read \u2014 Lavingia\u2019s DOGE stint lasted just 55 days \u2014 but it is does provide new details on the temporary government organization formed by President Trump\u2019s executive order.<\/p>\n 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> a platform where creators can sell their goods. He\u2019s also a well-known seed and angel investor<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t a well-oiled machine.<\/p>\n As a volunteer who had a salary of $0, he was immediately tasked with identifying \u201cwasteful\u201d contracts and the people the VA should lay off, he wrote. But he was surprised to discover facets like seniority and the person\u2019s veteran status (this was the VA, after all) determined who could be targeted. Performance could be factored in lower on the list, in Lavingia\u2019s view.<\/p>\n He also described DOGE\u2019s advisory role<\/a> as like a McKinsey management consultant and said DOGE is not responsible for the actions taken by the orgs.\u00a0\u201cDOGE 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 \u2018fall guy\u2019 for unpopular decisions,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is similar to what Musk was decrying this week to the Washington Post<\/a>. Musk described DOGE as Washington, D.C.\u2019s\u00a0 \u201cwhipping boy,\u201d<\/a> blamed for every unpopular decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0Because his DOGE missives didn\u2019t take much time, he said he worked on projects that interested him, including overhauling the UX of the VA\u2019s already-in-use LLM-based chatbot.<\/p>\n He said he built a fairly long list of stuff in his less-than-two-month stint but didn\u2019t get a chance to do enormous projects, like \u201cimproving the UX of veterans\u2019 filing disability claims or automating\/speeding up claims processing.\u201d<\/p>\n And, he wrote, \u201cI was never able to get approval to ship anything to production that would actually improve American lives \u2014 while also saving money for the American taxpayer.\u201d<\/p>\n He was, however, given permission to open source much of his work. His work included a tool that scanned internal PDFs for terms \u201crelated to DEI, gender identity, COVID policies, climate initiatives, WHO partnerships,\u201d he described<\/a> on the tool\u2019s page, as well as tools that used LLMs to analyze contracts and a tool for building org charts.<\/p>\n He also made observations about the lack of organization in DOGE itself. \u201cI wondered why there wasn\u2019t a centralized DOGE software engineering playbook with all of our learnings; overall, I was surprised by the lack of knowledge-sharing within DOGE. It seemed like every engineer started from scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n