Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes:

On March 27th, Sahil Lavingia walked into the Secretary of War Suite, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, to attend an all-hands meeting of the Department of Government Efficiency. Lavingia had been a DOGE employee for two weeks, part of a small team embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So far, it had been an unexpectedly isolating experience. Lavingia communicated over the messaging app Signal with another member of the V.A.’s DOGE team, but there didn’t seem to be a Signal channel where he could interact with the rest of DOGE. Instead, Lavingia would watch Elon Musk, who led the initiative, engage with his allies on X. Lavingia told me, “You’d see where the dolphins were swimming—like, now we’re looking at D.E.I. contracts—and so you’d swim there, too.”

Before coming to Washington, Lavingia lived in New York, where he worked at Gumroad, an e-commerce site that he’d founded more than a decade earlier. He wasn’t really a MAGA guy, but he had always thought it would be interesting to work in government, and he admired Musk. In October, at a tech meetup at the New York offices of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Lavingia talked with someone who later introduced him to a DOGE staffer. The staffer put him in touch with a DOGE engineer, who connected him with a DOGE recruiter. The calls didn’t last much longer than five minutes. “All the questions were about ‘When can you move to D.C.?’ ” Lavingia said. Eventually, Lavingia told me, he talked to Steve Davis, the president of Musk’s Boring Company, who asked if Lavingia could code. Yes, Lavingia said. A few weeks later, he got a text: a job had opened up at the V.A. “I felt like, O.K., finally, that’s some information,” Lavingia said. He started in mid-March, making an hourly wage of about thirteen dollars.

President Donald Trump formally created DOGE by executive order on his first day in office, rebranding what had been the United States Digital Service, a kind of internal tech consultancy for the federal government. Musk’s allies quickly staffed it: Davis, who had helped Musk overhaul Twitter, effectively became C.O.O., and Chris Young, a Republican political operative who had led Musk’s super PAC, became a senior adviser. On February 2nd, Wired identified six young computer engineers, all in their late teens or early twenties, who were working for DOGE. The young coders, collectively dubbed the “DOGE kids,” had set up shop at the Office of Personnel Management and at the General Services Administration, where, according to Politico, some of them appeared to be living, having furnished four rooms with IKEA beds. That cinched the cultural image. DOGE was the tech industry’s outpost in government, the department that would move fast and break things.

Initially, it was hard to know how seriously to take the new venture, whose name derived from a meme coin. A senior figure at a conservative think tank predicted to me that DOGE would yield nothing more than a government report that would get stuffed away in a drawer. But DOGE staffers were soon identifying contracts to cancel and employees to let go. On January 28th, the Office of Personnel Management sent most federal employees an e-mail titled “Fork in the Road,” which warned of involuntary downsizing to come and offered them the chance to resign with eight months of pay and benefits. (Musk had sent Twitter employees an e-mail with nearly the same subject shortly after he bought the social-media company, which he rebranded as X.) Those who stayed in their jobs were soon required to document, at the end of each week, five things that they had worked on. A series of lawsuits accumulated in DOGE’s wake, but its actions seemed to be producing results. At the end of March, the Times estimated that the federal government had potentially been cut by twelve per cent.

Lavingia and other members of the DOGE team at the V.A. had prepared a list of accomplishments to present at the all-hands meeting. There were about fifty people in the room at the Secretary of War Suite, a surprisingly small number, Lavingia thought, if this was all of DOGE. When Musk walked in, he asked attendees to share their recent victories, and pontificated about how broken the government was. “It was this very surreal scene,” Lavingia said. He tried to engage Musk in a conversation about a project, but “everyone looked at me like I was weird, like, ‘Why are you trying to get feedback from your boss?’ ” At one point, someone asked how many I.T. workers there were at the I.R.S. It turned out to be more than seven thousand. (The agency has a total of around a hundred thousand employees.) A member of DOGE’s I.R.S. team said that he thought the tax agency needed an “exorcist.” “Elon was, like, ‘Wait, seriously?’ ” Lavingia recalled. After a few hours, Lavingia left, disappointed. “It’s almost like this is one of the things you get for working at DOGE,” he said. “You get to hang out with Elon once in a while.”

Lavingia had already grown skeptical of the effort. At the V.A., he’d initially planned to update what he’d been told was an outmoded and fragmented human-resources system, but it seemed to be working just fine. “DOGE never had an information flow that was, like, ‘Hey, Elon wants us to do this,’ ” Lavingia said. “You’re asked to give a lot, but you don’t get any access to information.” In April, he returned to New York, working remotely on improving the V.A.’s internal chatbot, VA GPT. In early May, he gave an interview that was published in Fast Company, in which he said of the government, “It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” Not long after that, his access to the V.A. systems was cut off; he was fired. [Continue reading…]