Mastodawn

MicroWave Jun 5, 2025

Former DOGE engineer says federal waste and fraud were 'relatively nonexistent'

Former DOGE engineer says federal waste and fraud were 'relatively nonexistent' - Lemmy.World

A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were “relatively nonexistent” during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs. “I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,” Sahil Lavingia told NPR’s Juana Summers. Lavingia was a successful software developer and the founder of Gumroad, a platform for online sales, when he joined DOGE in March. Lavingia said he had previously sought to work for the U.S. Digital Service, the technology unit that was renamed and restructured by the Trump administration. He told NPR that he just wanted to make government websites easier for citizens to use and didn’t really care which presidential administration he was working for, despite protests from his friends and family.

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Zachariah Jun 6, 2025

No shit. Pretty much the only bloat in government is the private contracts—usually for the unauditable “defense” budget.

If you’ve paid any attention, government programs are usually forced to operate with absolutely minimal funding. And the people who make it all work anyway—often with personal dedication and sacrifice—are heroes.

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deranger Jun 6, 2025

Having worked for the government, I assure you there is absolutely waste happening on a huge level. One time I threw out about $50k of lab equipment calibrators that someone clearly bought a ton of at the end of the year to use their whole budget so they didn’t lose it the following year.

Nobody suggested reworking how budgets work though, so clearly the mission was not to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse.

government programs are usually forced to operate with absolutely minimal funding

Not the military, that’s a massive source of expenditure. That’s where I saw the waste happening.

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mineralfellow Jun 6, 2025

Yeah, that is terrible! Spending $50k on something that might be helpful or useful in the future! We should have used that money to purchase one JDAM kit so we can bomb more people.

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deranger

Thing is, it wasn’t helpful or useful, and it’s clear whoever ordered it had no clue what was going on. We use maybe 1-2 boxes of calibrators a year. I probably threw out 6 dozen boxes, all the exact same lot and expiration date, that had been sitting in the back of the -80C freezer for years.