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.
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.
And the only Medicare fraud is done by people like senator Rick Scott on the provider’s side.
Health insurance companies. Far and away the worst of the worst when it comes to medicare fraud. Ever seen an itemized hospital bill? That, but worse. And it happens to tens of millions per year.
You dummy…when insurance companies do it, it’s smart business. I’ve learned the system coniders fraud until the correct amount of lobbying bribes are paid, the fraud dies and boom smrt business.
Thanks to Musk and Trump, they’re now unemployed heroes.
There are also too many contractors in non-defense agencies. It’s really terrible because it both increases costs, slows things down (in my opinion), and means that there is little retention of skilled workers.
Oddly, the main way to save money and increase efficency is to expand the government workforce. Although, I do think there needs to be more effort on how we focus government work.
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.
Not the military, that’s a massive source of expenditure. That’s where I saw the waste happening.
This kind of thing is infuriating. I’ve seen that before as well (not the tossing, but using money they didn’t have to to, to not lose it next year)
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.
Thing is, it wasn’t helpful or useful, and it’s clear whoever ordered it had no clue what was going on. We used maybe 1-2 boxes of those 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.
That money could have gone towards any one of the actual lifesaving research programs we had going, but instead it went to some vendor.
So you agree with him then
No, they said government stuff is on a shoestring budget and doesn’t waste. This is not at all my experience with military / medical / research fields.
This wasn’t a contracting issue, it was blowing the budget on pointless reagents to ensure the budget wasn’t decreased the following year. They just picked the most expensive reagent and bought a ton - all the same lot, all the same expiration date.