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.
A lot of the inefficiencies come from being understaffed. You end up waiting on another department to do something so you can move forward. The work on site mandate and the buyout have made this insanely worse. I work as a consultant in the public sector for tech. The team I’m working with now went from 5 people down to two and they have one that they have hired but is still waiting for the paperwork to go through to start working. They were hired in December. The on site mandate fucked this military base. They have 8000+ employees and ~4500 parking spots. Everyone is basically expected to show up late and the police stopped giving parking tickets because it was too much work. With everyone on base the internet access is almost unusable until about 4:30 pm when people start leaving. We put in a request for a service account that our product requires 3 weeks ago and are still waiting for it because that team downsized and can’t keep up… And on, and on, and on…
These over worked, under staffed teams are spinning plates right now. When those plates come crashing down they’re going to end up hiring IBM, VMware, General Dynamics, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc… consultants to fix the mess and get them back to spinning. That’s going to be so much more expensive than just keeping those previous people on staff. It’s going to be wild in 6-12 months imo.
“When those plates come crashing down they’re going to end up hiring IBM, VMware, General Dynamics, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc… consultants to fix the mess and get them back to spinning” That’s not a bug it’s a feature those contract will go to someone who “donated” to the Taco.
It’s just going to be all the same people that he cut contracts from. What they did was get a list of the companies they were spending the most with and started cutting contracts. They’re going to end up having to go back to those same companies. This time with desperation.