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, 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.